At this date, Thackeray's _Esmond_ has passed from the domain of
criticism into that securer region where the classics, if they do not
actually "slumber out their immortality," are at least preserved from
profane intrusion. This "noble story"[61]--as it was called by one of its
earliest admirers--is no longer, in any sense, a book "under review."
The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and
compass, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered
professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the
results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now
established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who
assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first
place, if _Esmond_ be not the author's greatest work (and there are
those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that
rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind,
for its sequel, _The Virginians_, however admirable in detached
passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while _Denis Duval_, of which
the promise was "great, remains unfinished. With _Vanity Fair_, the
author's masterpiece in another manner, _Esmond_ cannot properly be
compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in
verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary picture.
Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone
epoch, lies _Esmond's_ second and incontestable claim to length of days.
Athough fifty years and more have passed since it was published, it is
still unrivalled as the typical example of that class of historical
fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and
feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them each
from within, and investing them impartially with a common atmosphere of
illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with the
same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on
this score. Even if--as always--later researches should have revised our
conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book as
an imaginative _tour de force_ is unimpaired. Little remains therefore
for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and neglected
notes on its first appearance.
Note:
[61] "Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his abilities
are, could have written so noble a story as _Esmond_."--WALTER SAVAGE
LANDOR, August 1856.
In Thackeray's work, the place of _The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a
Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself_--lies
midway between his four other principal books, _Vanity Fair, Pendennis,
The Newcomes_, and _The Virginians_; and its position serves, in a
measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and
miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly
appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of
_Vanity Fair_. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came
_Pendennis_. _Vanity Fair_ had been the condensation of a life's
experience; and excellent as _Pendennis_ would have seemed from any
inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that,
though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent
upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a
whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that--as he afterwards
told his friend Elwin concerning _The Newcomes_--"he had exhausted all
the types of character with which he was familiar." Accordingly he
began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in
the year that followed the publication of _Pendennis_, prepared and
delivered in England and Scotland a series of _Lectures upon the English
Humourists of the Eighteenth Century_. With the success of these came
the prompting for a new work of fiction,--not to be contemporary, and
not to be issued in parts. His studies for the _Humourists_ had
saturated him with the spirit of a time to which--witness his novelette
of _Barry Lyndon_--he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George
Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for
£1000, he was already well in hand with _Esmond_,--an effort in which,
if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible
to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851,
_Esmond_ progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was
completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it was
set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and it
was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the eve
of the author's departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting
on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer, when
he received his bound copies from the publisher.
Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied Thackeray to the United States,
and had for some time previously been acting as his "factotum and
amanuensis," has recorded several interesting details with regard to the
writing of _Esmond_, To most readers it will be matter of surprise, and
it is certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author's powers, that this
attempt to revive the language and atmosphere of a vanished era was in
great part dictated. It has even been said that, like _Pendennis_, it
was _all_ dictated; but this it seems is a mistake, for, as we shall see
presently, part of the manuscript was prepared by the author himself. As
he warmed to his work, however, he often reverted to the method of oral
composition which had always been most congenial to him, and which
explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much of the "copy" was
taken down by Mr. Crowe in a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young Street,
Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity Fair had been written;
at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden; at the round table in the
Athenasum library, and elsewhere. "I write better anywhere than at
home,"--Thackeray told Elwin,--"and I write less at home than anywhere."
Sometimes author and scribe would betake themselves to the British
Museum, to look up points in connection with Marlborough's battles, or
to rummage Jacob Tonson's Gazettes for the official accounts of
Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, indeed, was another of
_Esmond's_ birthplaces. By favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi, Thackeray and
his assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were accommodated in one
of the secluded galleries. "I sat down,"--says Mr. Crowe--"and wrote to
dictation the scathing sentences about the great Marlborough, the
denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. As a curious instance of literary
contagion, it may be here stated that I got quite bitten, with the
expressed anger at their misdeeds against General Webb, Thackeray's
kinsman and ancestor; and that I then looked upon Secretary Cardonnel's
conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted to find his
meannesses justly pilloried in _Esmond's_ pages." What rendered the
situation more piquant,--Mr. Crowe adds,--all this took place on the
site of old Montague House, where, as Steele's "Prue" says to St. John
in the novel," you wretches go and fight duels."[62]
Note:
[62] _With Thackeray in America_, 1893, p. 4.
Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge, may, if they
please, inspect the very passages which aroused the enthusiam of
Thackeray's secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity
College, not far from those which enclose the manuscripts of Tennyson
and Milton, is the original and only manuscript of _Esmond_, being in
fact the identical "copy" which was despatched to the press of Messrs.
Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two large quarto volumes,
and was presented to the College (Esmond's College!) in 1888 by the
author's son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears in
pencil the names of the different compositors who set up the type. Much
of it is in Thackeray's own small, slightly-slanted, but oftener upright
hand, and many pages have hardly any corrections.[63] His custom was to
write on half-sheets of a rather large notepaper, and some idea may be
gathered of the neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added that
the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and that there are
frequently as many as thirty-three of these lines to a page. Some of the
rest of the "copy" is in the handwriting of the author's daughter, now
Lady Ritchie; but a considerable portion was penned by Mr. Eyre Crowe.
The oft-quoted passage in book ii. chap. vi. about "bringing your
sheaves with you," was written by Thackeray himself almost as it stands;
so was the sham _Spectator_, hereafter mentioned, and most of the
chapter headed "General Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael." But the
splendid closing scene,--"August 1st, 1714,"--is almost wholly in the
hand of Mr. Crowe. It is certainly a remarkable fact that work at this
level should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, as we are
credibly informed, should have been before committed to paper.[64]
When _Esmond_ first made its appearance in October 1852, it was not
without distinguished and even formidable competitors. _Bleak House_ had
reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running _My Novel in
Blackwood_. In _Fraser_, Kingsley was bringing out _Hypatia_; and Whyte
Melville was preluding with _Digby Grand_. Charlotte Brontë must have
been getting ready _Villette_ for the press; and Tennyson--undeterred by
the fact that his hero had already been "dirged" by the indefatigable
Tupper--was busy with his _Ode on the Death of the Duke of
Wellington_.[65] The critics of the time were possibly embarrassed with
this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset, immoderately
enthusiastic over the new arrival. The _Athenaeum_ was by no means
laudatory. _Esmond_ "harped upon the same string"; "wanted vital heat";
"touched no fresh fount of thought"; "introduced no novel forms of
life"; and so forth. But the _Spectator_, in a charming greeting from
George Brimley (since included in his _Essays_), placed the book, as a
work of art, even above _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_; the "serious and
orthodox" _Examiner_, then under John Forster, was politely judicial;
the _Daily News_ friendly; and the _Morning Advertiser_ enraptured. The
book, this last declared, was the "beau-ideal of historical romance." On
December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came the
_Times_. Whether the _Times_ remembered and resented a certain
delightfully contemptuous "Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," with which
Thackeray retorted to its notice of _The Kickkburys on the Rhine_ (a
thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,--its report of _Esmond_
was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but the
character of Marlborough, and the writer's "incomparably easy and
unforced style." Thackeray thought that it had "absolutely stopped" the
sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher sent
him a supplementary cheque for £250 on account of _Esmond's_ success.
Notes:
[63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's "copy." "Page
after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print"--says
Mr. Mowbray Morris. "I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of
_Kenilworth_ in the British Museum, and examined the end with particular
care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must
surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the
volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the
whole chapter" (Lecture at Eton, _Macmillan's Magazine_ (1889), lx.
pp. 158-9).
[64] "The sentences"--Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum,
when speaking of his task--"came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced the
room." This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow
elaboration of the Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray must
often have arranged in his mind precisely much that he meant to say.
Such seems indeed to have been his habit. The late Mr. Lockcer-Lampson
informed the writer of this paper that once, when he met the author of
Esmond in the Green Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to walk
alone, as he had some verses In his head which he was finishing. They
were those which afterwards appeared in the _Cornhill_ for January 1867,
under the title of _Mrs. Katherine's Lantern_.
[65] The Duke died 14th Sept. 1852.
Another reason which may have tended to slacken--not to stop--the sale,
is also suggested by the author himself. This was the growing popularity
of _My Novel_ and _Villette_. And Miss Brontë's book calls to mind the
fact that she was among the earliest readers of _Esmond_, the first two
volumes of which were sent to her in manuscript by George Smith, She
read it, she tells him, with "as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and
admiration," marvelling at its mastery of reconstruction,--hating its
satire,--its injustice to women. How could Lady Castlewood peep through
a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid!
There was too much political and religious intrigue--she thought.
Nevertheless she said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol. i.)
the author might "yet make it the best he had ever written." In March
she had seen the second volume. The character of Marlborough (here she
anticipated the _Times_) was a "masterly piece of writing." But there
was "too little story." The final volume, by her own request, she
received in print. It possessed, in her opinion, the "most sparkle,
impetus, and interest." "I hold," she wrote to Mr. Smith, "that a work
of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the _real_ should be
sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the _ideal_" In a later
letter she gives high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix,
traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of the papers that
she resembled. Blanche Amory [the _Athenaeum_ and _Examiner_, it may be
noted, regarded her as "another Becky"]. "To me," Miss Bronte exclaims,
"they are about as identical as a weasel and a royal tigress of Bengal;
both the latter are quadrupeds, both the former women." These frank
comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, are of genuine
interest. When the book was published, Thackeray himself sent her a copy
with his "grateful regards," and it must have been of this that she
wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3,--"Colonel Henry Esmond is just
arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne's
garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by
the old _Spectator_ type."[66]
Note:
[66] Mr. Clement Shorter's _Charlotte Brontë and her Circle_,
1896, p. 403; and Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, 1900, pp. 561
et seq.
One of the points on which Miss Brontë does not touch,--at all events
does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have been
printed,--is the marriage with which _Esmond_ closes. Upon this event it
would have been highly instructive to have had her views, especially as
it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first
reviewers. It was the gravamen of the _Times_ indictment; to the critic
of _Fraser_ it was highly objectionable; and the _Examiner_ regarded it
as "incredible." Why it was "incredible" that a man should marry a woman
seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed once in
vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually reminded
("she looks the sister of her daughter" says the old Dowager at
Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it obvious to
Lady Castlewood's children, "Mother's in love with you,--yes, I think
mother's in love with you," says downright Frank Esmond; the only
impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And
Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. "As
for you," she tells Esmond, "you want a woman to bring your slippers and
cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry 'O caro! O bravo!' whilst you read
your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff" [which shows that she herself
had read Swift's _Grand Question Debated_]. "Mamma would have been the
wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years
older than she does," "You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old
man!" adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The situation
is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires
consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others
signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the author,
if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that his
story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be some
diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have accepted
Thackeray's solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of
undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early
Victorian age. To those who read _Esmond_ now, noting carefully the
almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side, as
developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and
heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained. And
that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is handled
with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[67]
Note:
[67} Thackeray's own explanation was more characteristic than
convincing. "Why did you"--said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of
Edinburgh--"Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?" "My dear
lady," he replied, "it was not I who married them. They married
themselves." (Dr. _John Brmon_, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903,
pp. 96-7.)
Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps, at
this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less vigorously
alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have
suffered from the very attention which _Esmond_ and _The Humourists_
have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of Marlborough
is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good enough
for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a
family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists have
considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would the
latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse _that_ presentment. In the
purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the _Lectures_,
and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been offered on
those performances. The Swift of _The Humourists_, modelled on Macaulay,
was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in the
novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[68] Addison has
been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less
questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more discussion.
That Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most
essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously
conceived under the domination of the "poor Dick" of Addison, and dwells
far too persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible aspect. No
one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed
periwig, who hiccups Addison's _Campaign_ in the Haymarket garret, or
the fuddled victim of "Prue's" curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at
the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and that he
was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar,
but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent politician.
Probably the author of _Esmond_ considered that, in a mixed character,
to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally "in the quotidian
undress and relaxation of his mind" (as Lamb says), anything like
biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the
impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that
Thackeray, talking to him once about _The Virginians_, which was then
appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in
Goldsmith, "representing him as he really was, a little, shabby, mean,
shuffling Irishman." These are given as Thackeray's actual words. If so,
they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last
lecture of _The Humourists._[69]
Notes:
[68] Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. "As for
Swift, you haven't made me alter my opinion"--he replied to Hannay's
remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as
a clergyman, was insincere. "Of course,"--he wrote in September, 1851,
in a letter now in the British Museum,--"any man is welcome to believe
as he likes for me _except_ a parson; and I can't help looking upon
Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades ... with a
scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness."
[69] _Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters_, 1902, i. 187. The
intention was never carried out. In _The King over the Water_, 1908,
Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another
portrait in _Esmond_,--that of the Chevalier de St. George,--not without
injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang--like Rob
Roy--is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the
reader to this highly interesting study.
But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the
picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of
his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse,
his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it
triumphantly in his maturity by those _Novels by Eminent Hands_ in which
the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is
more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has
rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in
stray letters and detached passages.
In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial
report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in _Denis Duval_; and in
the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess
Castlewood[70]--a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish
script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of
that "baby-faced" Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself "L
duchesse de Portsmout." It is better still in the letter from Walpole to
General Conway in chap. xl. of _The Virginians_, which is perfect, even
to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the
crown and top of these _pastiches_ is certainly the delightful paper,
which pretends to be No. 341 of the _Spectator_ for All Fools' Day,
1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats "Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix," to
what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a "bite."[71] Here
Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick of
speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the "tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive," that although this
pseudo-_Spectator_ is stated to have been printed "exactly as those
famous journals were printed" for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables,
it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the
contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph,
unluckily appended an English translation,--a concession to the country
gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained,
holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase)
"words to the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]
Notes:
[70] _Esmond_, Book ii, chap, ii.
[71] _Ib_. Book iii, chap, iii.
[72] _Spectator_, No. 221, November 13, 1711.
This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect
imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of
_Esmond_. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been
advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic
authority, that "no man, woman, or child in _Esmond_, ever says anything
that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne." This is
one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head,
invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly "copied the language of
Queen Anne,"--he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he
himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim
as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell
(who was his fellow-passenger to America on the _Canada_) to point out
in _Esmond_ a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth
century; and that the author of _The Biglow Papers_ promptly discovered
such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the
invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew better
than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to ingenuity
rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the
Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his
verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of
Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a
lozenge,--everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured
after when "copying the language of Queen Anne," and succeeded in
attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic
philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional
picturesque archaisms, such as "yatches" for "yachts," or despise the
artful aid of terminal k's, long s's, and old-cut type. Consequently, as
was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest prejudice
against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact),
it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of Queen
Anne's Colonel which could never have been employed until Her Majesty
had long been "quietly inurned." What is more,--if we mistake not,--the
author of _Esmond_ sometimes refrained from using an actual
eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct told him
it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known
anecdote of Steele beside his father's coffin, In _Tatler_ No. 181,
reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, "My mother
catched me in her arms." "Catched" is good enough eighteenth-century for
Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it "caught," and "caught" it
remains to this day both in _Esmond_ and _The Humourists_.