TO MR. BROOKFIELD
September 16, 1849
Have you read Dickens? Oh, it is charming! Brave Dickens! "David
Copperfield" has some of his prettiest touches, and the reading
of the book has done another author a great deal of good.
--W.M.T.
[Illustration: W.M. THACKERAY]
There are certain good old ladies in every community who
wear perennial mourning. They attend every funeral, carrying
black-bordered handkerchiefs, and weep gently at the right time. I have
made it a point to hunt out these ancient dames at their homes, and, over
the teacups, I have discovered that invariably they enjoy a sweet
peace--a happiness with contentment--that is a great gain. They seem to
be civilization's rudimentary relic of the Irish keeners and the paid
mourners of the Orient.
And there is just a little of this tendency to mourn with those who mourn
in all mankind. It is not difficult to bear another's woe--and then there
is always a grain of mitigation, even in the sorrow of the afflicted,
that makes their tribulation bearable.
Burke affirms, in "On the Sublime," that all men take a certain
satisfaction in the disasters of others. Just as Frenchmen lift their
hats when a funeral passes and thank God that they are not in the hearse,
so do we in the presence of calamity thank Heaven that it is not ours.
Perhaps this is why I get a strange delight from walking through a
graveyard by night. All about are the white monuments that glisten in
the ghostly starlight, the night-wind sighs softly among the grassy
mounds--all else is silent--still.
This is the city of the dead, and of all the hundreds or thousands who
have traveled to this spot over long and weary miles, I, only I, have the
power to leave at will. Their ears are stopped, their eyes are closed,
their hands are folded--but I am alive.
One of the first places I visited on reaching London was Kensal Green
Cemetery. I quickly made the acquaintance of the First Gravedigger, a
rare wit, over whose gray head have passed full seventy pleasant summers.
I presented him a copy of "The Shroud," the organ of the American
Undertakers' Association, published at Syracuse, New York. I subscribe
for "The Shroud" because it has a bright wit-and-humor column, and also
for the sweet satisfaction of knowing that there is still virtue left in
Syracuse.
The First Gravedigger greeted me courteously, and when I explained
briefly my posthumous predilections we grasped hands across an open grave
(that he had just digged) and were fast friends.
"Do you believe in cremation, sir?" he asked.
"No, never; it's pagan."
"Aye, you are a gentleman--and about burying folks in churches?"
"Never! A grave should be out under the open sky, where the sun by day
and the moon and stars----"
"Right you are. How Shakespeare can ever stand it to have his grave
walked over by a boy choir is more than I can understand. If I had him
here I could look after him right. Come, I'll show you the company I
keep!"
Not twenty feet from where we stood was a fine but plain granite block to
the memory of the second wife of James Russell Lowell.
"Just Mr. Lowell and one friend stood by the grave when we lowered the
coffin--just two men and no one else but the young clergyman who belongs
here. Mr. Lowell shook hands with me when he went away. He gave me a
guinea and wrote me two letters afterward from America; the last was sent
only a week before he died. I'll show 'em to you when we go to the
office. Say, did you know him?"
He pointed to a slab, on which I read the name of Sydney Smith. Then we
went to the graves of Mulready, the painter; Kemble, the actor; Sir
Charles Eastlake, the artist. Next came the resting-place of
Buckle--immortal for writing a preface--dead at thirty-seven, with his
history unwrit; Leigh Hunt sleeps near, and above his dust a column that
explains how it was erected by friends. In life he asked for bread; when
dead they gave him a costly pile of stone.
Here are also the graves of Madame Tietjens; of Charles Mathews, the
actor; and of Admiral Sir John Ross, the Arctic explorer.
"And just down the hill aways another big man is buried. I knew him well;
he used to come and visit us often. The last time I saw him I said as he
was going away, 'Come again, sir; you are always welcome!'
"'Thank you, Mr. First Gravedigger,' says he; 'I will come again before
long, and make you an extended visit.' In less than a year the hearse
brought him. That's his grave--push that ivy away and you can read the
inscription. Did you ever hear of him?"
It was a plain, heavy slab placed horizontally, and the ivy had so run
over it that the white of the marble was nearly obscured. But I made out
this inscription:
WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
Born July 18, 1811
Died Dec. 24, 1863
ANNE CARMICHAEL SMYTH
Died Dec. 18, 1864, aged 72--his mother
by her first marriage
The unpoetic exactness of that pedigree gave me a slight chill. But here
they sleep--mother and son in one grave. She who gave him his first
caress also gave him his last; and when he was found dead in his bed, his
mother, who lived under the same roof, was the first one called. He was
the child of her girlhood--she was scarcely twenty when she bore him. In
life they were never separated, and in death they are not divided. It is
as both desired.
Thackeray was born in India, and was brought to England on the death of
his father, when he was six years of age. On the way from Calcutta the
ship touched at the Island of Saint Helena. A servant took the lad ashore
and they walked up the rocky heights to Longwood, and there, pacing back
and forth in a garden, they saw a short, stout man.
"Lookee, lad, lookee quick--that's him! He eats three sheep every day and
all the children he can get!"
"And that's all I had to do with the Battle of Waterloo," said "Old
Thack," forty years after. But you will never believe it after reading
those masterly touches concerning the battle, in "Vanity Fair."
Young Thackeray was sent to the Charterhouse School, where he was
considered rather a dull boy. He was big and good-natured, and read
novels when he should have studied arithmetic. This tendency to "play
off" stuck to him at Cambridge--where he did not remain long enough to
get a degree, but to the relief of his tutors went off on a tour through
Europe.
Travel as a means of education is a very seductive bit of sophistry.
Invalids whom the doctors can not cure, and scholars whom teachers can
not teach, are often advised to take "a change." Still there is reason in
it.
In England Thackeray was intent on law; at Paris he received a strong
bent toward art; but when he reached Weimar and was introduced at the
Court of Letters and came into the living presence of Goethe, he caught
the infection and made a plan for translating Schiller.
Schiller dead was considered in Germany a greater man than Goethe living,
as if it were an offense to live and a virtue to die. And young William
Makepeace wrote home to his mother that Schiller was the greatest man
that ever lived and that he was going to translate his books and give
them to England.
No doubt there are certain people born with a tendency to infectiousness
in regard to certain diseases; so there are those who catch the literary
mania on slight exposure.
"I've got it," said Thackeray, and so he had.
He went back to England and made groggy efforts at Blackstone, and
Somebody's Digest, and What's-His-Name's Compendium, but all the time he
scribbled and sketched.
The young man had come into possession of a goodly fortune from his
father's estate--enough to yield him an income of over two thousand
dollars a year. But bad investments and signing security for friends took
the money the way that money usually goes when held by a man who has not
earned it.
"Talk about riches having wings," said Thackeray; "my fortune had pinions
like a condor, and flew like a carrier-pigeon."
When Thackeray was thirty he was eking out a meager income writing poems,
reviews, criticisms and editorials. His wife was a confirmed invalid, a
victim of mental darkness, and his sorrows and anxieties were many.
He was known as a bright writer, yet London is full of clever,
unsuccessful men. But in Thackeray's thirty-eighth year "Vanity Fair"
came out, and it was a success from the first.
In "Yesterdays With Authors," Mr. Fields says: "I once made a pilgrimage
with Thackeray to the various houses where his books had been written;
and I remember when we came to Young Street, Kensington, he said, with
mock gravity, 'Down on your knees, you rogue, for here "Vanity Fair" was
penned; and I will go down with you, for I have a high opinion of that
little production myself.'"
Young Street is only a block from the Kensington Metropolitan
Railway-Station. It is a little street running off Kensington Road. At
Number Sixteen (formerly Number Thirteen), I saw a card in the window,
"Rooms to Rent to Single Gentlemen."
I rang the bell, and was shown a room that the landlady offered me for
twelve shillings a week if I paid in advance; or if I would take another
room one flight up with a "gent who was studying hart" it would be only
eight and six. I suggested that we go up and see the "gent." We did so,
and I found the young man very courteous and polite.
He told me that he had never heard Thackeray's name in connection with
the house. The landlady protested that "no man by the name o' Thack'ry
has had rooms here since I rented the place; leastwise, if he has been
here he called hisself by sumpthink else, which was like o'nuff the case,
as most ev'rybody is crooked now'days--but surely no decent person can
blame me for that!"