Charles Dickens and other Victorians

THACKERAY (I)

I

Among many wise sayings left behind him by the late Sir Walter Raleigh—our Sir Walter and Oxford’s of whom his pupils there would say, “But Raleigh is a prince”—there haunts me as I begin to speak of Thackeray, a slow remark dropped as from an afterthought upon those combatants who are for ever extorting details of Shakespeare’s private life out of the Plays and the Sonnets, and those others (Browning, for example, and Matthew Arnold) who in revulsion have preached Shakespeare up for the grand impersonal artist who never unlocked his heart, who smiles down upon all questioning and is still

Out-topping knowledge.

Such a counter-claim may be plausible—is at any rate excusable if only as an oath upon the swarm of pedlars who infest Shakespeare and traffic in obscure hints of scandal. Yet, it will not work. “It would never be entertained,” says Raleigh, “by an artist, and would have had short shrift from any of the company that assembled at the Mermaid Tavern. No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. No dramatist can create live characters save by bequeathing the best of himself to the children of his art, scattering among them a largess of his own qualities, giving, it may be, to one his wit, to another his philosophic doubt, to another his love of action, to another the simplicity and constancy that he finds deep in his own nature. There is no thrill of feeling communicated from the printed page but has first been alive in the mind of the author: there was nothing alive in his mind that was not intensely and sincerely felt. Plays like Shakespeare’s cannot be written in cold blood; they call forth the man’s whole energies, and take toll of the last farthing of his wealth of sympathy and experience.”

II

No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. That is the sentence, of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most intimately on our subject this morning. The story runs that Thackeray, one day tapping impatiently upon the cover of some adulatory memoir of somebody, warm from the press, enjoined upon his family, “None of this nonsense about me, after my death”: and the injunction was construed by his daughter, Lady Ritchie, most piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too strictly, for certain not with the happiest results. For this denial of any authoritative biography—of a writer and a clean-living English gentleman who might, if any human being can or could, have walked up to the Recording Angel and claimed his dossier without a blush—has not only let in a flood of spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings he most likely never uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or accent to give pain that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a number of editions with gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must say it) none the more helpful for being tinctured by affection and qualified by reserve.

This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as I suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily on his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too: dark enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish—nor is it necessary—to break in upon any reticence. But you probably know the main outline of the story—of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who living moderately beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his affluence, lost the remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to run a newspaper—two newspapers. The National Standard had soon (in his own phrase) to be hauled down, and The Constitutional belied its title by a rapid decline and decease. Thus he lost a moderate patrimony, and we find him next as a roving journalist in Paris, divided between pen and pencil, with an almost empty pocket. There, in August, 1836, at the British Embassy, he made a most imprudent but happy marriage—most happy, that is for a while. Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:

Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters were born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they can taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the future’s chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in Philip:

Always this refrain in Thackeray—the text which Dr. Johnson once had inscribed on his watch, ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ, “For the night cometh.”

With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it imperatively required removal and restraint.

III

I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact must be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all. Without knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache behind his jolly Ballad of Bouillabaisse?

If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the days of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a desolated man; as a man who, having built a fine house for himself in Kensington Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If he built himself a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a page of The Newcomes was written but on Club paper or at a hotel. It would seem as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so domestic by instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the Reform Club, where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For above all (let The Rose and the Ring with its delightful and delicate occasion attest) Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery—the sort of great fellow to whom on entrance every child, as every dog, takes by instinct. In the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the gayest unforgettable verses:

Or, for elder taste,

—with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this fooling—in Tennyson’s day, too—and not the least of them was Edward Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense—nursery Mozart of the Magic Flute—to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson dedicated those very lovely stanzas beginning:

He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into

for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:

and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery I dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the Bong tree grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe

or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man” rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we

IV

No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious, corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation—FitzGerald (to whom he was “old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake—all with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to have been something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it to the nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace between wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them—the England of Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind—but a high-spirited hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The Men of Old”:

A plenty of English writers—some of them accounted highly serious writers—had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them. Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical; Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe. Canning had it—take, for example, a single stage-direction in The Rovers:

Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a delirium in excelsis. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding, afterwards learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set, had a brow severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral virtue with just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it rose to a scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it Alpine. Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:

And later, May 22, 1842:

I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he was in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when I add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed and desolate home—on a home from which his heart drove him to flee, no matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble his novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little closer to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad heart.

V

I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or Thackwras—which I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had for some generations prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in the service of the old East India Company. Their tombs are thick in the old graveyard of Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would ponder their epitaphs, or is interested in the stock from which Thackeray sprang, to a little book by the late Sir William Hunter entitled The Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves (Henry Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray himself was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July, 1811, and, according to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian children, was shipped home to England at the age of five, just as Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel; and when he pictured the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back up the ghaut, or river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish eyes had seen and his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout Paper” On Letts’s Diary and you will read concerning that parting:

This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray never did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond Shakespeare (no vile nomen!), Agent to the Governor-General for Central India. The news of his death gave occasion to the tender little essay from which I have been quoting.

On the passage their ship touched at St. Helena, and their black servant took them a long walk over rocks and hills “until we reached a garden, where we saw a man walking. ‘That’s he,’ said the black man: ‘that is Bonaparte! He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands upon.’”—After which terrible vision no doubt the youngsters resumed their Odyssey—as Homer would put it—

“Stricken at heart yet rejoicing to have escaped perdition.” They reached London to find it plunged in mourning (and, for many reasons, in very genuine mourning) by the death of the Princess Charlotte: and young Thackeray proceeded to Chiswick, to the charge and care of his aunt Mrs. Ritchie. One day she caught the child trying on his uncle’s large hat, and, finding to her alarm that it accurately fitted him, swept him off to the fashionable physician, Sir Charles Clark: “Reassure yourself, madam,” the doctor is reported as saying: “he has, to be sure, an abnormal head; but I think there’s something in it.” He was put to school first at a young gentlemen’s academy at Chiswick, maybe next door to Miss Pinkerton’s Seminary for Young Ladies through the portals of which (if you remember, and into the garden) Miss Rebecca Sharp hurled back her “leaving copy” of Dr. Johnson’s “Dixonary.” The master would seem to have been a Dr. Swishtail, compounded of negligence and tyranny, as so many “private schoolmasters” chose to be even to days of my own experience. But here is the child’s first letter, dated February 18, 1818, to his mother in India and composed in a round hand between ruled lines:

The separating sea was wide: but what a plucky little letter!

VI

I shall lay stress on it for a moment because, as it seems to me, if we read between the childish lines, they not only evince the pluck of the child, and not only breathe a waft of the infinite pathos of English children, Indian born: but because I hold that no one who would understand Thackeray can afford to forget that he was of Anglo-Indian stock, bone and marrow.

Now I want, avoiding so much of offence as I may, to say a word or two (and these only as a groping through private experience, to illustrate Thackeray) about the retired Anglo-Indian as he has come within the range of a long experience at an English town by the seashore. On the whole I know of no human being more typically pathetic. His retirement may be happier in some places such as Cheltenham, where he has a Club in which he can meet old Indian cronies or men from “the other side,” and tell stories and discuss the only politics which interest them. But in any odd angle of this capital yet most insular isle his isolation is horrible and fatal. Compared with it, the sorrows of a British child “sent home” (as conveyed, and to the very heart, in Mr. Kipling’s Wee Willie Winkie, for example) are tragically insignificant. Youth is elastic and can recover. But this grown man, through the “long, long Indian days,” has toiled and supported himself upon a hope, to end in England with fishing or shooting and a share of that happy hospitality which (God knows) he has earned.

What happens? The domestic servant question (always with us), cold rooms, dinner-parties at which stories about Allahabad are listened to patiently by ladies who confuse it with Lahore, polite men who suggest a game of “snooker pool” as a relief, hoping for not too many anecdotes in the course of it. And for this your friend and his admirable wife have been nursing, feeding themselves on promise for, maybe, thirty years and more, all the time and day after day—there lies the tragedy—dutifully giving all their best, for England, in confidence of its reward.

It is not altogether our fault. It is certainly not our fault that the partridges do not rise on the stubble or the salmon leap up and over the dams in such numbers as the repatriated fondly remember. To advise a lady accustomed to many Indian servants upon tact with a couple or three of English ones—post-War too—is (as Sir Thomas Browne might say) to bid her sleep in Epicurus his faith, and reacclimatise her notion. But, to be short, they talk to us politics which have no basis discoverable in this country.

Yet, withal, they are so noble! So simple in dignity! Far astray from any path of progress as we may think him; insane as we may deem his demand to rule, unreasonable his lament over the lost England of his youth which for so long he has sentimentalised, or domestic his interest in his nephews, the Anglo-Indian has that key of salvation which is loyalty. He is for England: and for that single cause I suppose no men or women that ever lived and suffered on earth have suffered more than those who lie now under the huddled gravestones of Calcutta.

VII

I am coming to this: that those who accuse Thackeray of being a snob (even under his own definition) should in fairness lay their account that he came of people who, commanding many servants, supported the English tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign land.

I believe this to explain him in greater measure than he has generally been explained or understood. Into a class so limited, so exiled, so professional in its aims and interests—so borné and repugnant against ideas that would invade upon the tried order of things and upset caste along with routine—so loyal to its own tradition of service, so dependent for all reward upon official recognition (which often means the personal caprice of some Governor or Secretary of State or Head of Department), some Snobbery—as we understand the word nowadays—will pretty certainly creep; to make its presence felt, if not to pervade. But I am not going to discuss with you the question, “Was Thackeray that thing he spent so much pains, such excessive pains, in denouncing?”—over which so many disputants have lost their tempers. It is not worth our while, as the whole business, to my thinking, was not worth Thackeray’s while. When we come to it—as we must, because it bulks so largely in his work—we shall quickly pass on.

To me it seems that Thackeray’s geniture and early upbringing—all those first impressions indelible in any artist—affected him in subtler ways far better worth our considering. Let me just indicate two.

VIII

For the first.—It seems to me that Thackeray—a social delineator or nothing—never quite understood the roots of English life or of the classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify underground deep and out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside. Walter Bagehot, after quoting from Venus and Adonis Shakespeare’s famous lines on a driven hare, observes that “it is absurd to say we know nothing about the man who wrote that: we know he had been after a hare.” I cannot find evidence in his works that this child, brought from Calcutta to Chiswick, transferred to the Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street, Club-land, had ever been after a hare: and if you object that this means nothing, I retort that it means a great deal: it means that he never “got off the pavement.” It means that he is on sure ground when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob, but on no sure ground at all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that in depicting a class—now perhaps vanishing—he never, for example, got near the spirit that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with his gamekeeper:

Absurd? Very well—but you will never understand the politics of the last century—that era so absurdly viewed out of focus, just now, as one of mere industrial expansion—unless you lay your account with it better than Thackeray did. As you know, he once stood for Parliament, as Liberal candidate for the City of Oxford: and it is customary to rejoice over his defeat as releasing from party what was meant for mankind. In fact he never had a true notion of politics or of that very deep thing, political England. Compare his sense of it—his novelist’s sense—with Disraeli’s. He and Disraeli, as it happens, both chose to put the famous-infamous Marquis of Hertford into a novel. But what a thing of cardboard, how entirely without atmosphere of political or social import, is Lord Steyne in Vanity Fair as against Lord Monmouth in Coningsby!

IX

The late Herman Merivale, in a very brilliant study, interrupted by death and left to be completed by Sir Frank Marzials, finds the two key-secrets (as he calls them) of Thackeray’s life to be these—Disappointment and Religion. I propose ten days hence to examine this, and to speak of both. But I may premise, here and at once, that Thackeray was a brave man who took the knocks of life without flinching (even that from young Venables’ fist, which broke his nose but not their friendship), and that to me the melancholy which runs through all his writing—the melancholy of Ecclesiastes, the eternal Mataiotes Mataioteton—Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity—was drawn by origin from the weary shore of Ganges and brought in the child’s blood to us, over the sea.

“Vanity of vanities,” saith the Preacher—Thackeray was before all else a Preacher: and that is the end of it, whether in a set of Cornhill verses or in his most musical, most solemn, prose—

And now hear the burden of it on that famous page telling how Harry Esmond walked home after breaking the news of Duke Hamilton’s duel and death:

A heavy passage, Gentlemen—and commonplace? Ah! as you grow older you will find that most of the loveliest, most of the most sacred passages in literature are commonplaces exquisitely turned and tuned to catch and hold new hearts.