ESMOND AND THE VIRGINIANS.
The novel with which we are now going to deal I regard as the greatest
work that Thackeray did. Though I do not hesitate to compare himself
with himself, I will make no comparison between him and others; I
therefore abstain from assigning to _Esmond_ any special niche among
prose fictions in the English language, but I rank it so high as to
justify me in placing him among the small number of the highest class of
English novelists. Much as I think of _Barry Lyndon_ and _Vanity Fair_,
I cannot quite say this of them; but, as a chain is not stronger than
its weakest link, so is a poet, or a dramatist, or a novelist to be
placed in no lower level than that which he has attained by his highest
sustained flight. The excellence which has been reached here Thackeray
achieved, without doubt, by giving a greater amount of forethought to
the work he had before him than had been his wont. When we were young we
used to be told, in our house at home, that "elbow-grease" was the one
essential necessary to getting a tough piece of work well done. If a
mahogany table was to be made to shine, it was elbow-grease that the
operation needed. Forethought is the elbow-grease which a novelist,--or
poet, or dramatist,--requires. It is not only his plot that has to be
turned and re-turned in his mind, not his plot chiefly, but he has to
make himself sure of his situations, of his characters, of his effects,
so that when the time comes for hitting the nail he may know where to
hit it on the head,--so that he may himself understand the passion, the
calmness, the virtues, the vices, the rewards and punishments which he
means to explain to others,--so that his proportions shall be correct,
and he be saved from the absurdity of devoting two-thirds of his book to
the beginning, or two-thirds to the completion of his task. It is from
want of this special labour, more frequently than from intellectual
deficiency, that the tellers of stories fail so often to hit their nails
on the head. To think of a story is much harder work than to write it.
The author can sit down with the pen in his hand for a given time, and
produce a certain number of words. That is comparatively easy, and if he
have a conscience in regard to his task, work will be done regularly.
But to think it over as you lie in bed, or walk about, or sit cosily
over your fire, to turn it all in your thoughts, and make the things
fit,--that requires elbow-grease of the mind. The arrangement of the
words is as though you were walking simply along a road. The arrangement
of your story is as though you were carrying a sack of flour while you
walked. Fielding had carried his sack of flour before he wrote _Tom
Jones_, and Scott his before he produced _Ivanhoe_. So had Thackeray
done,--a very heavy sack of flour,--in creating _Esmond_. In _Vanity
Fair_, in _Pendennis_, and in _The Newcomes_, there was more of that
mere wandering in which no heavy burden was borne. The richness of the
author's mind, the beauty of his language, his imagination and
perception of character are all there. For that which was lovely he has
shown his love, and for the hateful his hatred; but, nevertheless, they
are comparatively idle books. His only work, as far as I can judge them,
in which there is no touch of idleness, is _Esmond_. _Barry Lyndon_ is
consecutive, and has the well-sustained purpose of exhibiting a finished
rascal; but _Barry Lyndon_ is not quite the same from beginning to end.
All his full-fledged novels, except _Esmond_, contain rather strings of
incidents and memoirs of individuals, than a completed story. But
_Esmond_ is a whole from beginning to end, with its tale well told, its
purpose developed, its moral brought home,--and its nail hit well on the
head and driven in.
I told Thackeray once that it was not only his best work, but so much
the best, that there was none second to it. "That was what I intended,"
he said, "but I have failed. Nobody reads it. After all, what does it
matter?" he went on after awhile. "If they like anything, one ought to
be satisfied. After all, Esmond was a prig." Then he laughed and changed
the subject, not caring to dwell on thoughts painful to him. The
elbow-grease of thinking was always distasteful to him, and had no doubt
been so when he conceived and carried out this work.
To the ordinary labour necessary for such a novel he added very much by
his resolution to write it in a style different, not only from that
which he had made his own, but from that also which belonged to the
time. He had devoted himself to the reading of the literature of Queen
Anne's reign, and having chosen to throw his story into that period, and
to create in it personages who were to be peculiarly concerned with the
period, he resolved to use as the vehicle for his story the forms of
expression then prevalent. No one who has not tried it can understand
how great is the difficulty of mastering a phase of one's own language
other than that which habit has made familiar. To write in another
language, if the language be sufficiently known, is a much less arduous
undertaking. The lad who attempts to write his essay in Ciceronian Latin
struggles to achieve a style which is not indeed common to him, but is
more common than any other he has become acquainted with in that tongue.
But Thackeray in his work had always to remember his Swift, his Steele,
and his Addison, and to forget at the same time the modes of expression
which the day had adopted. Whether he asked advice on the subject, I do
not know. But I feel sure that if he did he must have been counselled
against it. Let my reader think what advice he would give to any writer
on such a subject. Probably he asked no advice, and would have taken
none. No doubt he found himself, at first imperceptibly, gliding into a
phraseology which had attractions for his ear, and then probably was so
charmed with the peculiarly masculine forms of sentences which thus
became familiar to him, that he thought it would be almost as difficult
to drop them altogether as altogether to assume the use of them. And if
he could do so successfully, how great would be the assistance given to
the local colouring which is needed for a novel in prose, the scene of
which is thrown far back from the writer's period! Were I to write a
poem about Coeur de Lion I should not mar my poem by using the simple
language of the day; but if I write a prose story of the time, I cannot
altogether avoid some attempt at far-away quaintnesses in language. To
call a purse a "gypsire," and to begin your little speeches with "Marry
come up," or to finish them with "Quotha," are but poor attempts. But
even they have had their effect. Scott did the best he could with his
Coeur de Lion. When we look to it we find that it was but little;
though in his hands it passed for much. "By my troth," said the knight,
"thou hast sung well and heartily, and in high praise of thine order."
We doubt whether he achieved any similarity to the language of the time;
but still, even in the little which he attempted there was something of
the picturesque. But how much more would be done if in very truth the
whole language of a story could be thrown with correctness into the form
of expression used at the time depicted?
It was this that Thackeray tried in his _Esmond_, and he has done it
almost without a flaw. The time in question is near enough to us, and
the literature sufficiently familiar to enable us to judge. Whether folk
swore by their troth in the days of king Richard I. we do not know, but
when we read Swift's letters, and Addison's papers, or Defoe's novels we
do catch the veritable sounds of Queen Anne's age, and can say for
ourselves whether Thackeray has caught them correctly or not. No reader
can doubt that he has done so. Nor is the reader ever struck with the
affectation of an assumed dialect. The words come as though they had
been written naturally,--though not natural to the middle of the
nineteenth century. It was a tour de force; and successful as such a
tour de force so seldom is. But though Thackeray was successful in
adopting the tone he wished to assume, he never quite succeeded, as far
as my ear can judge, in altogether dropping it again.
And yet it has to be remembered that though _Esmond_ deals with the
times of Queen Anne, and "copies the language" of the time, as Thackeray
himself says in the dedication, the story is not supposed to have been
written till the reign of George II. Esmond in his narrative speaks of
Fielding and Hogarth, who did their best work under George II. The idea
is that Henry Esmond, the hero, went out to Virginia after the events
told, and there wrote the memoir in the form of an autobiography. The
estate of Castlewood in Virginia had been given to the Esmond family by
Charles II., and this Esmond, our hero, finding that expatriation would
best suit both his domestic happiness and his political
difficulties,--as the reader of the book will understand might be the
case,--settles himself in the colony, and there writes the history of
his early life. He retains the manners, and with the manners the
language of his youth. He lives among his own people, a country
gentleman with a broad domain, mixing but little with the world beyond,
and remains an English gentleman of the time of Queen Anne. The story is
continued in _The Virginians_, the name given to a record of two lads
who were grandsons of Harry Esmond, whose names are Warrington. Before
_The Virginians_ appeared we had already become acquainted with a scion
of that family, the friend of Arthur Pendennis, a younger son of Sir
Miles Warrington, of Suffolk. Henry Esmond's daughter had in a previous
generation married a younger son of the then baronet. This is mentioned
now to show the way in which Thackeray's mind worked afterwards upon the
details and characters which he had originated in _Esmond_.
It is not my purpose to tell the story here, but rather to explain the
way in which it is written, to show how it differs from other stories,
and thus to explain its effect. Harry Esmond, who tells the story, is of
course the hero. There are two heroines who equally command our
sympathy,--Lady Castlewood the wife of Harry's kinsman, and her
daughter Beatrix. Thackeray himself declared the man to be a prig, and
he was not altogether wrong. Beatrix, with whom throughout the whole
book he is in love, knew him well. "Shall I be frank with you, Harry,"
she says, when she is engaged to another suitor, "and say that if you
had not been down on your knees and so humble, you might have fared
better with me? A woman of my spirit, cousin, is to be won by gallantry,
and not by sighs and rueful faces. All the time you are worshipping and
singing hymns to me, I know very well I am no goddess." And again: "As
for you, you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at
your feet and cry, O caro, caro! O bravo! whilst you read your
Shakespeares and Miltons and stuff." He was a prig, and the girl he
loved knew him, and being quite of another way of thinking herself,
would have nothing to say to him in the way of love. But without
something of the aptitudes of a prig the character which the author
intended could not have been drawn. There was to be courage,--military
courage,--and that propensity to fighting which the tone of the age
demanded in a finished gentleman. Esmond therefore is ready enough to
use his sword. But at the same time he has to live as becomes one whose
name is in some degree under a cloud; for though he be not in truth an
illegitimate offshoot of the noble family which is his, and though he
knows that he is not so, still he has to live as though he were. He
becomes a soldier, and it was just then that our army was accustomed "to
swear horribly in Flanders." But Esmond likes his books, and cannot
swear or drink like other soldiers. Nevertheless he has a sort of liking
for fast ways in others, knowing that such are the ways of a gallant
cavalier. There is a melancholy over his life which makes him always,
to himself and to others, much older than his years. He is well aware
that, being as he is, it is impossible that Beatrix should love him. Now
and then there is a dash of lightness about him, as though he had taught
himself in his philosophy that even sorrow may be borne with a
smile,--as though there was something in him of the Stoic's doctrine,
which made him feel that even disappointed love should not be seen to
wound too deep. But still when he smiles, even when he indulges in some
little pleasantry, there is that garb of melancholy over him which
always makes a man a prig. But he is a gentleman from the crown of his
head to the sole of his foot. Thackeray had let the whole power of his
intellect apply itself to a conception of the character of a gentleman.
This man is brave, polished, gifted with that old-fashioned courtesy
which ladies used to love, true as steel, loyal as faith himself, with a
power of self-abnegation which astonishes the criticising reader when he
finds such a virtue carried to such an extent without seeming to be
unnatural. To draw the picture of a man and say that he is gifted with
all the virtues is easy enough,--easy enough to describe him as
performing all the virtues. The difficulty is to put your man on his
legs, and make him move about, carrying his virtues with a natural gait,
so that the reader shall feel that he is becoming acquainted with flesh
and blood, not with a wooden figure. The virtues are all there with
Henry Esmond, and the flesh and blood also, so that the reader believes
in them. But still there is left a flavour of the character which
Thackeray himself tasted when he called his hero a prig.
The two heroines, Lady Castlewood and Beatrix, are mother and daughter,
of whom the former is in love with Esmond, and the latter is loved by
him. Fault has been found with the story, because of the unnatural
rivalry,--because it has been felt that a mother's solicitude for her
daughter should admit of no such juxtaposition. But the criticism has
come, I think, from those who have failed to understand, not from those
who have understood, the tale;--not because they have read it, but
because they have not read it, and have only looked at it or heard of
it. Lady Castlewood is perhaps ten years older than the boy Esmond, whom
she first finds in her husband's house, and takes as a protégé; and from
the moment in which she finds that he is in love with her own daughter,
she does her best to bring about a marriage between them. Her husband is
alive, and though he is a drunken brute,--after the manner of lords of
that time,--she is thoroughly loyal to him. The little touches, of which
the woman is herself altogether unconscious, that gradually turn a love
for the boy into a love for the man, are told so delicately, that it is
only at last that the reader perceives what has in truth happened to the
woman. She is angry with him, grateful to him, careful over him,
gradually conscious of all his worth, and of all that he does to her and
hers, till at last her heart is unable to resist. But then she is a
widow;--and Beatrix has declared that her ambition will not allow her to
marry so humble a swain, and Esmond has become,--as he says of himself
when he calls himself "an old gentleman,"--"the guardian of all the
family," "fit to be the grandfather of you all."
The character of Lady Castlewood has required more delicacy in its
manipulation than perhaps any other which Thackeray has drawn. There is
a mixture in it of self-negation and of jealousy, of gratefulness of
heart and of the weary thoughtfulness of age, of occasional
sprightliness with deep melancholy, of injustice with a thorough
appreciation of the good around her, of personal weakness,--as shown
always in her intercourse with her children, and of personal
strength,--as displayed when she vindicates the position of her kinsman
Henry to the Duke of Hamilton, who is about to marry Beatrix;--a mixture
which has required a master's hand to trace. These contradictions are
essentially feminine. Perhaps it must be confessed that in the
unreasonableness of the woman, the author has intended to bear more
harshly on the sex than it deserves. But a true woman will forgive him,
because of the truth of Lady Castlewood's heart. Her husband had been
killed in a duel, and there were circumstances which had induced her at
the moment to quarrel with Harry and to be unjust to him. He had been
ill, and had gone away to the wars, and then she had learned the truth,
and had been wretched enough. But when he comes back, and she sees him,
by chance at first, as the anthem is being sung in the cathedral choir,
as she is saying her prayers, her heart flows over with tenderness to
him. "I knew you would come back," she said; "and to-day, Harry, 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 on, 'They that sow in tears
shall reap in joy, and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless
come home 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." And
so it goes on, running into expressions of heartmelting tenderness. And
yet she herself does not know that her own heart is seeking his with
all a woman's love. She is still willing that he should possess Beatrix.
"I would call you my son," she says, "sooner than the greatest prince in
Europe." But she warns him of the nature of her own girl. "'Tis for my
poor Beatrix I tremble, whose headstrong will affrights me, whose
jealous temper, and whose vanity no prayers of mine can cure." It is but
very gradually that Esmond becomes aware of the truth. Indeed, he has
not become altogether aware of it till the tale closes. The reader does
not see that transfer of affection from the daughter to the mother which
would fail to reach his sympathy. In the last page of the last chapter
it is told that it is so,--that Esmond marries Lady Castlewood,--but it
is not told till all the incidents of the story have been completed.
But of the three characters I have named, Beatrix is the one that has
most strongly exercised the writer's powers, and will most interest the
reader. As far as outward person is concerned she is very lovely,--so
charming, that every man that comes near to her submits himself to her
attractions and caprices. It is but rarely that a novelist can succeed
in impressing his reader with a sense of female loveliness. The attempt
is made so frequently,--comes so much as a matter of course in every
novel that is written, and fails so much as a matter of course, that the
reader does not feel the failure. There are things which we do not
expect to have done for us in literature because they are done so
seldom. Novelists are apt to describe the rural scenes among which their
characters play their parts, but seldom leave any impression of the
places described. Even in poetry how often does this occur? The words
used are pretty, well chosen, perhaps musical to the ear, and in that
way befitting; but unless the spot has violent characteristics of its
own, such as Burley's cave or the waterfall of Lodore, no striking
portrait is left. Nor are we disappointed as we read, because we have
not been taught to expect it to be otherwise. So it is with those
word-painted portraits of women, which are so frequently given and so
seldom convey any impression. Who has an idea of the outside look of
Sophia Western, or Edith Bellenden, or even of Imogen, though
Iachimo, who described her, was so good at words? A series of
pictures,--illustrations,--as we have with Dickens' novels, and with
Thackeray's, may leave an impression of a figure,--though even then not
often of feminine beauty. But in this work Thackeray has succeeded in
imbuing us with a sense of the outside loveliness of Beatrix by the mere
force of words. We are not only told it, but we feel that she was such a
one as a man cannot fail to covet, even when his judgment goes against
his choice.
Here the judgment goes altogether against the choice. The girl grows up
before us from her early youth till her twenty-fifth or twenty-sixth
year, and becomes,--such as her mother described her,--one whose
headlong will, whose jealousy, and whose vanity nothing could restrain.
She has none of those soft foibles, half allied to virtues, by which
weak women fall away into misery or perhaps distraction. She does not
want to love or to be loved. She does not care to be fondled. She has no
longing for caresses. She wants to be admired,--and to make use of the
admiration she shall achieve for the material purposes of her life. She
wishes to rise in the world; and her beauty is the sword with which she
must open her oyster. As to her heart, it is a thing of which she
becomes aware, only to assure herself that it must be laid aside and
put out of the question. Now and again Esmond touches it. She just
feels that she has a heart to be touched. But she never has a doubt as
to her conduct in that respect. She will not allow her dreams of
ambition to be disturbed by such folly as love.
In all that there might be something, if not good and great,
nevertheless grand, if her ambition, though worldly, had in it a touch
of nobility. But this poor creature is made with her bleared blind eyes
to fall into the very lowest depths of feminine ignobility. One lover
comes after another. Harry Esmond is, of course, the lover with whom the
reader interests himself. At last there comes a duke,--fifty years old,
indeed, but with semi-royal appanages. As his wife she will become a
duchess, with many diamonds, and be her Excellency. The man is stern,
cold, and jealous; but she does not doubt for a moment. She is to be
Duchess of Hamilton, and towers already in pride of place above her
mother, and her kinsman lover, and all her belongings. The story here,
with its little incidents of birth, and blood, and ignoble pride, and
gratified ambition, with a dash of true feminine nobility on the part of
the girl's mother, is such as to leave one with the impression that it
has hardly been beaten in English prose fiction. Then, in the last
moment, the duke is killed in a duel, and the news is brought to the
girl by Esmond. She turns upon him and rebukes him harshly. Then she
moves away, and feels in a moment that there is nothing left for her in
this world, and that she can only throw herself upon devotion for
consolation. "I am best in my own room and by myself," she said. Her
eyes were quite dry, nor did Esmond ever see them otherwise, save once,
in respect of that grief. She gave him a cold hand as she went out.
"Thank you, brother," she said in a low voice, and with a simplicity
more touching than tears, "all that you have said is true and kind, and
I will go away and will ask pardon."
But the consolation coming from devotion did not go far with such a one
as her. We cannot rest on religion merely by saying that we will do so.
Very speedily there comes consolation in another form. Queen Anne is on
her deathbed, and a young Stuart prince appears upon the scene, of whom
some loyal hearts dream that they can make a king. He is such as Stuarts
were, and only walks across the novelist's canvas to show his folly and
heartlessness. But there is a moment in which Beatrix thinks that she
may rise in the world to the proud place of a royal mistress. That is
her last ambition! That is her pride! That is to be her glory! The
bleared eyes can see no clearer than that. But the mock prince passes
away, and nothing but the disgrace of the wish remains.
Such is the story of _Esmond_, leaving with it, as does all Thackeray's
work, a melancholy conviction of the vanity of all things human.
_Vanitas vanitatum_, as he wrote on the pages of the French lady's
album, and again in one of the earlier numbers of _The Cornhill
Magazine_. With much that is picturesque, much that is droll, much that
is valuable as being a correct picture of the period selected, the gist
of the book is melancholy throughout. It ends with the promise of
happiness to come, but that is contained merely in a concluding
paragraph. The one woman, during the course of the story, becomes a
widow, with a living love in which she has no hope, with children for
whom her fears are almost stronger than her affection, who never can
rally herself to happiness for a moment. The other, with all her beauty
and all her brilliance, becomes what we have described,--and marries at
last her brother's tutor, who becomes a bishop by means of her
intrigues. Esmond, the hero, who is compounded of all good gifts, after
a childhood and youth tinged throughout with melancholy, vanishes from
us, with the promise that he is to be rewarded by the hand of the mother
of the girl he has loved.
And yet there is not a page in the book over which a thoughtful reader
cannot pause with delight. The nature in it is true nature. Given a
story thus sad, and persons thus situated, and it is thus that the
details would follow each other, and thus that the people would conduct
themselves. It was the tone of Thackeray's mind to turn away from the
prospect of things joyful, and to see,--or believe that he saw,--in all
human affairs, the seed of something base, of something which would be
antagonistic to true contentment. All his snobs, and all his fools, and
all his knaves, come from the same conviction. Is it not the doctrine on
which our religion is founded,--though the sadness of it there is
alleviated by the doubtful promise of a heaven?
Though thrice a thousand years are passed
Since David's son, the sad and splendid,
The weary king ecclesiast
Upon his awful tablets penned it.
So it was that Thackeray preached his sermon. But melancholy though it
be, the lesson taught in _Esmond_ is salutary from beginning to end. The
sermon truly preached is that glory can only come from that which is
truly glorious, and that the results of meanness end always in the mean.
No girl will be taught to wish to shine like Beatrix, nor will any youth
be made to think that to gain the love of such a one it can be worth his
while to expend his energy or his heart.
_Esmond_ was published in 1852. It was not till 1858, some time after he
had returned from his lecturing tours, that he published the sequel
called _The Virginians_. It was first brought out in twenty-four monthly
numbers, and ran through the years 1858 and 1859, Messrs. Bradbury and
Evans having been the publishers. It takes up by no means the story of
_Esmond_, and hardly the characters. The twin lads, who are called the
Virginians, and whose name is Warrington, are grandsons of Esmond and
his wife Lady Castlewood. Their one daughter, born at the estate in
Virginia, had married a Warrington, and the Virginians are the issue of
that marriage. In the story, one is sent to England, there to make his
way; and the other is for awhile supposed to have been killed by the
Indians. How he was not killed, but after awhile comes again forward in
the world of fiction, will be found in the story, which it is not our
purpose to set forth here. The most interesting part of the narrative is
that which tells us of the later fortunes of Madame Beatrix,--the
Baroness Bernstein,--the lady who had in her youth been Beatrix Esmond,
who had then condescended to become Mrs. Tasker, the tutor's wife,
whence she rose to be the "lady" of a bishop, and, after the bishop had
been put to rest under a load of marble, had become the baroness,--a
rich old woman, courted by all her relatives because of her wealth.
In _The Virginians_, as a work of art, is discovered, more strongly than
had shown itself yet in any of his works, that propensity to wandering
which came to Thackeray because of his idleness. It is, I think, to be
found in every book he ever wrote,--except _Esmond_; but is here more
conspicuous than it had been in his earlier years. Though he can settle
himself down to his pen and ink,--not always even to that without a
struggle, but to that with sufficient burst of energy to produce a
large average amount of work,--he cannot settle himself down to the task
of contriving a story. There have been those,--and they have not been
bad judges of literature,--who have told me that they have best liked
these vague narratives. The mind of the man has been clearly exhibited
in them. In them he has spoken out his thoughts, and given the world to
know his convictions, as well as could have been done in the carrying
out any well-conducted plot. And though the narratives be vague, the
characters are alive. In _The Virginians_, the two young men and their
mother, and the other ladies with whom they have to deal, and especially
their aunt, the Baroness Bernstein, are all alive. For desultory
reading, for that picking up of a volume now and again which requires
permission to forget the plot of a novel, this novel is admirably
adapted. There is not a page of it vacant or dull. But he who takes it
up to read as a whole, will find that it is the work of a desultory
writer, to whom it is not infrequently difficult to remember the
incidents of his own narrative. "How good it is, even as it is!--but if
he would have done his best for us, what might he not have done!" This,
I think, is what we feel when we read _The Virginians_. The author's
mind has in one way been active enough,--and powerful, as it always is;
but he has been unable to fix it to an intended purpose, and has gone on
from day to day furthering the difficulty he has intended to master,
till the book, under the stress of circumstances,--demands for copy and
the like,--has been completed before the difficulty has even in truth
been encountered.