I
I have recently had a literary adventure which, though not followed by
the prostration that sometimes ensues on adventures, has nevertheless
induced meditation. The adventure itself indeed was not astounding,
and I mention it, to be frank, only in the interest of its sequel.
It consisted merely, on taking up an old book again for the sake of a
certain desired and particular light, of my having found that the light
was in fact not there to shine, but was, on the contrary, directly
projected _upon_ the book from the very subject itself as to which
I had invoked assistance. The case, in short, to put it simply, was
that Thackeray’s charming fragment of “Denis Duval” proved to have
much less than I had supposed to say about the two little old towns
with which the few chapters left to us are mainly concerned, but that
the two little old towns, on the other hand, unexpectedly quickened
reflection on “Denis Duval.” Reading over Thackeray to help me further
to Winchelsea, I became conscious, of a sudden, that Winchelsea—which
I already in a manner knew—was only helping me further to Thackeray.
Reinforced, in this service, by its little sister-city of Rye, it
caused a whole question to open, and the question, in turn, added a
savour to a sense already, by good fortune, sharp. Winchelsea and Rye
form together a very curious small corner, and the measure, candidly
undertaken, of what the unfinished book had done with them, brought me
to a nearer view of them—perhaps even to a more jealous one; as well as
to some consideration of what books in general, even when finished, may
do with curious small corners.
I daresay I speak of “Denis Duval” as “old” mainly to make an
impression on readers whose age is less. I remember, after all,
perfectly, the poetry of its original appearance—there was such a
thrill, in those days, even after “Lovel the Widower” and “Philip,” at
any new Thackeray—in the cherished “Cornhill” of the early time, with
a drawing of Frederick Walker to its every number and a possibility
of its being like “Esmond” in its embroidered breast. If, moreover,
it after a few months broke short off, that really gave it something
as well as took something away. It might have been as true of works
of art as of men and women, that if the gods loved them they died
young. “Denis Duval” was at any rate beautiful, and was beautiful
again on reperusal at a later time. It is all beautiful once more
to a final reading, only it is remarkably different: and this is
precisely where my story lies. The beauty is particularly the beauty
of its being its author’s—which is very much, with book after book,
what we find ourselves coming to in general, I think, at fifty years.
Our appreciation changes—how in the world, with experience always
battering away, shouldn’t it?—but our feeling, more happily, doesn’t.
There _are_ books, of course, that criticism, when we are fit for it,
only consecrates, and then, with association fiddling for the dance,
we are in possession of a literary pleasure that is the highest of
raptures. But in many a case we drag along a fond indifference, an
element of condonation, which is by no means of necessity without its
strain of esteem, but which, obviously, is not founded on one of our
deeper satisfactions. Each can but speak, at all events, on such a
matter, for himself. It is a matter also, doubtless, that belongs to
the age of the loss—so far as they quite depart—of illusions at large.
The reason for liking a particular book becomes thus a better, or at
least a more generous, one than the particular book seems in a position
itself at last to supply. Woe to the mere official critic, the critic
who has never felt the _man_. You go on liking “The Antiquary” because
it is Scott. You go on liking “David Copperfield”—I don’t say you go on
reading it, which is a very different matter—because it is Dickens. So
you go on liking “Denis Duval” because it is Thackeray—which, in this
last case, is the logic of the charm I alluded to.
[Illustration: RYE, FROM WINCHELSEA GATE]
The recital here, as every one remembers, is autobiographic; the old
battered, but considerably enriched, world-worn, but finely sharpened
Denis looks back upon a troubled life from the winter fireside and
places you, in his talkative and contagious way,—he is a practised
literary artist,—in possession of the story. We see him in a placid
port after many voyages, and have that amount of evidence—the most,
after all, that the most artless reader needs—as to the “happy”
side of the business. The evidence indeed is, for curiosity, almost
excessive, or at least premature; as he again and again puts it before
us that the companion of his later time, the admirable wife seated
there beside him, is nobody else at all, any hopes of a more tangled
skein notwithstanding, than the object of his infant passion, the
little French orphan, slightly younger than himself, who is brought so
promptly on the scene. The way in which this affects us as undermining
the “love-interest” bears remarkably on the specific question of the
subject of the book as the author would have expressed this subject
to his own mind. We get, to the moment the work drops, not a glimpse
of his central idea; nothing, if such had been his intention, was
in fact ever more triumphantly concealed. The darkness therefore is
intensified by our seeming to gather that, like the love-interest, at
all events, the “female interest” was not to have been largely invoked.
The narrator is in general, from the first, full of friendly hints,
in Thackeray’s way, of what is to come; but the chapters completed
deal only with his childish years, his wondrous boy-life at Winchelsea
and Rye, the public and private conditions of which—practically, in
the last century, the same for the two places—form the background for
this exposition. The southeastern counties, comparatively at hand,
were enriched at that period by a considerable French immigration,
the accession of Huguenot fugitives too firm in their faith to have
bent their necks to the dire rigours with which the revocation of the
Edict of Nantes was followed up. This corner of Sussex received—as
it had received in previous centuries—its forlorn contingent; to the
interesting origin of which many Sussex family names—losing, as it
were, their drawing but not their colour—still sufficiently testify.
Portions of the stranger race suffered, struggled, sank; other portions
resisted, took root and put forth branches, and Thackeray, clearly,
had found his rough material in some sketchy vision of one of these
obscure cases of troubled adjustment, which must often have been, for
difficulty and complexity, of the stuff of dramas. Such a case, for the
informed fancy, might indeed overflow with possibilities of character,
character reinforced, in especial, by the impression, gathered and
matured on the spot, of the two small ghosts of the Cinque Ports
family, the pair of blighted hill-towns that were once sea-towns and
that now draw out their days in the dim after-sense of a mere indulged
and encouraged picturesqueness. “Denis Duval” could only, it would
seem, have been conceived as a “picturesque” affair; but that may serve
exactly as a reason for the attempt to refigure it.
Little hilltop communities sensibly even yet, with the memory of their
tight walls and stiff gates not wholly extinct, Rye and Winchelsea
hold fast to the faint identity which remains their least fragile
support, their estate as “Antient Towns” involved (with the distincter
Five and raising the number to seven), in that nominal, though still
occasionally pompous Wardenship, the image—for our time—of the most
famous assignment of which is preserved in Longfellow’s fine verses on
the death of the Duke of Wellington. The sea, in previous times half
friend, half foe, began long since to fight, in each character, shy
of them, and now, in wrinkled wistfulness, they look across at the
straight blue band, two miles or so away, that tells of the services
they rendered, the illusions they cherished,—illusions in the case of
poor Winchelsea especially absurd,—and the extreme inconvenience they
repeatedly suffered. They were again and again harried and hacked by
the French, and might have had, it would seem, small appetite for the
company, however reduced and disarmed, of these immemorial neighbours.
The retreating waters, however, had even two centuries ago already
placed such dangers on a very different footing, and the recovery and
evocation of some of the old processes of actual absorption may well
have presented themselves to Thackeray as a problem of the sort that
tempts the lover of human histories. Happy and enviable always the
first trepidation of the artist who lights on a setting that “meets”
his subject or on a subject that meets his setting. The editorial
notes to “Denis Duval” yield unfortunately no indication of whether
Winchelsea put into his head the idea of this study, or of whether
he carried it about till he happened judiciously to drop it there.
Appearances point, in truth, to a connection of the latter kind,
for the fragment itself contains no positive evidence that Thackeray
ever, with the mere eye of sense, beheld the place; which is precisely
one of the ambiguities that challenge the critic and an item in the
unexpectedness that I spoke of at the beginning of these remarks.
What—in the light, at least, of later fashions—the place has to
offer the actual observer is the effect of an object seen, a thing of
aspect and suggestion, situation and colour; but what had it to offer
Thackeray—or the taste of forty years ago—that he so oddly forbore to
give us a tangled clew to? The impression of to-day’s reader is that
the chapters we possess might really have been written without the
author’s having stood on the spot; and that is just why they have, as I
began by saying, so much less to contribute to our personal vision than
this influence, for its part, has to suggest in respect to the book
itself.
Evidently, none the less, the setting, little as it has got itself
“rendered,” did somehow come into the painter’s ken; we know this,
moreover, independently, and we make out that he had his inner
mysteries and his reasons. The little house of Duval, faring forth from
the stress of the Alsatian fatherland, seeks safety and finds business
in the shrunken city, scarce at last more than a hamlet, of Edward the
First’s defeated design, where, in three generations, well on into the
century, it grinds and sleeps, smuggles and spends, according to the
fashions of the place and time. These communities appear to have had,
in their long decline, little industry but their clandestine traffic
with other coasts, in the course of which they quite mastered the art
of going, as we say, “one better” than the officers of the revenue. It
is to this hour a part of the small romance of Rye that you may fondly
fancy such scant opulence as rears its head to have had its roots in
the malpractice of forefathers not too rude for much cunning—in nightly
plots and snares and flurries, a hurrying, shuffling, hiding, that
might at any time have put a noose about most necks. Some of those
of the small gentry who were not smugglers were recorded highwaymen,
flourishing about in masks and with pistols; and indeed in the
general scene, as rendered by the supposed chronicler, these appear
the principal features. The only others are those of his personal and
private situation, which in fact, however, strikes me as best expressed
in the fact that the extremely talkative, discursive, ejaculatory,
and moralising Denis was possessed in perfection of his master’s
maturest style. He writes, almost to the life, the language of the
“Roundabout Papers;” so that if the third person had been exchanged,
throughout, for his first, and his occasional present tense been
superseded by the past, the rest of the text would have needed little
rearrangement. This imperfect unity was more or less inevitable—the
difficulty of projecting yourself as somebody else is never so great as
when you retain the _form_ of being yourself; but another of the many
reflections suggested by reperusal is as to whether the speaker is not
guilty of a slight abuse. Of course it may be said that what really has
happened was that Thackeray had, on his side, anticipated his hero in
the use of his hero’s natural idiom. It may thus have been less that
Denis had come to write highly “evolved” nineteenth-century English
than that his creator had arrived, in the “Roundabout Papers” and
elsewhere, at writing excellent reconstructed eighteenth. It would not,
however, were the enquiry to be pushed, be only on the autobiographer’s
personal and grammatical, but on his moral and sentimental accent,
as it were, that criticism would probably most bear. His manner of
thinking and feeling is quite as “Roundabout” as his manner of saying.
[Illustration: RYE, FROM THE WINCHELSEA ROAD]
A dozen wonderments rise here, and a dozen curiosities and
speculations; as to which, in truth, I am painfully divided between the
attraction of such appeals and a certain other aspect of my subject to
which I shall attempt presently to do justice. The superior stroke, I
remind myself—possibly not in vain—would be to deal handsomely with
both solicitations. The almost irresistible fascination, critically
speaking, of the questions thus abruptly, after long years, thrust
forth by the book, lies in their having reference to this very
opposition of times and tastes. The thing is not forty years old,
but it points already—and that is above all the amusement of it—to a
general _poetic_ that, both on its positive and its negative sides,
we have left well behind. Can the author perhaps have had in mind,
misguidedly, some idea of what his public “wanted” or didn’t want? The
public is really, to a straight vision, I think, not a capacity for
wanting, at all, but only an unlimited capacity for _taking_—taking
that (whatever it is) which will, in effect, make it open its mouth.
It goes to the expense of few preconceptions, and even on the question
of opening its mouth has a consciousness limited to the suspicion that
in a given case this orifice _has_—or has not—gaped. We are therefore
to imagine Thackeray as perfectly conscious that he himself, working
by his own fine light, constituted the public he had most to reckon
with. On the other hand his time, in its degree, had helped to shape
him, and a part of the consequence of this shaping, apparently, was his
extraordinary avoidance of picture. This is the mystery that drives
us to the hypothesis of his having tried to pay, in some uncanny
quarter, some deluded deference. Was he under the fear that, even as
_he_ could do it, “description” would not, in the early sixties, be
welcome? It is impossible to stand to-day in the high, loose, sunny,
haunted square of Winchelsea without wondering what he could have been
thinking of. There are ladies in view with easels, sun-bonnets and
white umbrellas—often perceptibly, too, with nothing else that makes
for successful representation; but I doubt if it were these apparitions
that took the bloom from his vision, for they were much less frequent
in those looser days, and moreover would have formed much more a reason
for not touching the place at all than for taking it up indifferently.
Of any impulse to make the reader see it with seeing eyes his page,
at all events, gives no sign. We must presently look at it for
ourselves, even at the cost, or with the consequence, of a certain
loyal resentment. For Winchelsea is strange, individual, charming. What
_could_ he—yes—have been thinking of? We are wound up for saying that
he has given his subject away, until we suddenly remember that, to this
hour, we have never really made out what his subject was to have been.
Never was a secret more impenetrably kept. Read over the fragment—which
reaches, after all, to some two hundred and fifty pages; read over,
at the end of the volume, the interesting editorial notes; address
yourself, above all, in the charming series of introductions lately
prepared by Mrs. Richmond Ritchie for a new and, so far as possible,
biographical edition of her father’s works, to the reminiscences
briefly bearing on Denis, and you will remain in each case equally
distant from a clew. It is the most puzzling thing in the world, but
there _is_ no clew. There are indications, in respect to the book,
from Thackeray’s hand, memoranda on matters of detail, and there is in
especial a highly curious letter to his publisher; yet the clew that
his own mind must have held never shows the tip of its tail. The letter
to his publisher, in which, according to the editor of the fragment, he
“sketches his plot for the information of” that gentleman, reads like a
mystification by which the gentleman was to be temporarily kept quiet.
With an air of telling him a good deal, Thackeray really tells him
nothing—nothing, I mean, by which he himself would have been committed
to (any more than deterred from) any idea kept up his sleeve. If he
were holding this card back, to be played at his own time, he could
not have proceeded in the least differently; and one can construct
to-day, with a free hand, one’s picture of his private amusement at
the success of his diplomacy. All the while, what _was_ the card? The
production of a novel finds perhaps its nearest analogy in the ride
across country; the competent novelist—that is, the novelist with the
real seat—presses his subject, in spite of hedges and ditches, as hard
as the keen fox-hunter presses the game that has been started for his
day with the hounds. The fox is the novelist’s idea, and when he rides
straight, he rides, regardless of danger, in whatever direction that
animal takes. As we lay down “Denis Duval,” however, we feel not only
that we are off the scent, but that we never really have been, with
the author, on it. The fox has got quite away. For it carries us no
further, surely, to say—as may possibly be objected—that the author’s
subject was to have been neither more nor less than the adventures of
his hero; inasmuch as, turn the thing as we will, these “adventures”
could at the best have constituted nothing more than its _form_. It is
an affront to the memory of a great writer to pretend that they were
to have been arbitrary and unselected, that there was nothing in his
mind to determine them. The book was, obviously, to have been, as boys
say, “about” them. But what were _they_ to have been about? Thackeray
carried the mystery to his grave.