Charles Dickens and other Victorians

THACKERAY (II)

I

I left off, Gentlemen, upon a saying of Herman Merivale’s that the two key-secrets of Thackeray’s life were Disappointment and Religion, and I proposed, examining this to-day, to speak of both.

Well, for the first, I have already (I think) given full room in the account to that domestic sorrow which drove him, great boon favourite of the nursery, to flee from his grand new house in Kensington Gardens—

to write his novels anywhere rather than at home. In the words of Barnes’ beautiful lament, which I here make free to divorce from its native dialect—

II

But those who stress this Disappointment in Thackeray go on to allege other causes, additional causes, for it: as that he lost a comfortable patrimony early in life, and that, conscious of great powers, he felt them for many years unappreciated, and, when appreciated, partially eclipsed by the popularity of his great rival, Dickens. Now I don’t deny that one disappointment may accumulate upon another on a man: but I ask you to consider also that in criticism one nail may drive out another, and that in ordinary one explanation is better than two, almost always far better than three: the possible conclusion being that not one of the three—not even the first—is the right one.

Actually, then, Thackeray as a young man lost his patrimony by flinging the hazard quite gallantly and honourably, as a young man should; foolishly perhaps, as a young man will, but having been just as young and foolish I am even now not turned Cato enough to condemn a boy for that. Let us see just what happened.

From the Charterhouse he came up here, to Trinity. His means have been variously computed: but you may put it down pretty safely at £500 a year—a very pretty sum indeed for an undergraduate. What he did with it you may find for yourselves in those brilliant chapters in Pendennis—perhaps the very best written on University life—which treat of Pen’s career at Cambridge.

(For it is Cambridge, of course, though he calls it Oxbridge. And here may I parenthetically drop a long-hoarded curse upon that trick of the Victorian novelists of sending up their young heroes to Oxbridge or Camford, entering them usually at the College of St. Boniface, head of the river or just about to be head. If, from the pages of Victorian fiction, a crew could be mustered to unmoor and paddle down the dear old ’Varsity barge, in the early June twilight, past the Pike and Eel to Iffley, there to await the crack of the rifle that loosens the tense muscles,—heavens! what a crew!—or, as Matthew Arnold would say, “what a set!”—all so indifferent to the rules of training, so like in appearance to young Greek gods, so thirsty!—and, on the run of it, what laurels for dear old St. Boniface!... I don’t know why these hermaphrodite names “Oxbridge” and “Camford” have always been so peculiarly repugnant to me: but they always have been, and are. I feel somehow as if to be a graduate of either were to offend against the Table of Forbidden Degrees. But Thackeray achieved one success in the blending—when he combined “scout” and “gyp” into “skip.”)

Oxbridge, then, in Pendennis is Cambridge. Thackeray came up in February, 1829—in the Lent term, that is, instead of in the previous October—I cannot discover for what reason. It made him, however, by the rules then prevailing, a non ens or non annus man for that year: and being also a non-reading man, he decided after two years of genially unprofitable residence, to refuse the Tripos and a degree, and retire on London, and took chambers at Hare Court in the Temple. His age was twenty.

III

Sainte-Beuve—I have read reasonably in his voluminous works, but without as yet happening on the passage which, quoted by Stevenson in his Apology for Idlers, really needs no verification by reference, being just an opinion dropped, and whoever dropped it and when, equally valuable to us—Sainte-Beuve, according to Stevenson, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years before we go hence: and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter XX, which is the Differential Calculus, or in Chapter XXXIX, which is hearing the band play in the gardens. Note well, if you please, that I am not endorsing this as a word of advice for Tripos purposes. I am but applying it to Thackeray, who never sat for his degree, but left Cambridge to write Vanity Fair, Pendennis, Esmond, sundry other great stories, with several score of memorable trifles—ballads, burlesques, essays, lectures, Roundabout Papers, what-not. If I may again quote from Sir Walter Raleigh, “there are two Days of Judgment, of which a University examination in an Honours School is considerably the less important.” The learning we truly take away from a University is (as I conceive) the talent, whatever it be, we use (God helping), and turn to account. Says Mr. Charles Whibley of Thackeray’s two years here:

As a matter of fact, of course, the Charterhouse and Cambridge had taught him much more, even of scholarship. “Scholarship,” is, to be sure, a relative term which, if lifted to the excellent heights—to scorn lower degrees of comparison—(as heaven forbid it should not be) will exclude all who have so learnt their Horace at school that in after life merely to rehearse and patch together from memory an Ode of his, long ago learnt for “repetition,” brings comfort to the soul and can steel it, Romanly, under the stars even on Himalayan outposts. But if there be aught worthy the name of scholarship to have that one author bred into your bones—why, then, I challenge that Thackeray did carry away a modicum of scholarship (and a very pure modicum, too) from school and university. I shall come to his prose cadences by and by, and will say no more of them here than that—in Esmond especially, but in general and throughout his prose—they are inconceivable by me save as the cadences of a writer early trained upon Greek and Latin. For blunter evidence, you will find the Roundabout Papers redolent—in quotation, reminiscences, atmosphere—of Horace on every page; and for evidence yet more patent take his avowed imitation of Horace (Odes i. 38), the two famous, jolly Sapphic stanzas beginning Persicos odi. Turn to your Conington (say) and you will find them most neatly and adequately rendered: and then take your Thackeray—

Years ago, I discoursed, standing here, on the Horatian Model in English Verse, attempting to show you how this man and that man—Andrew Marvell, for example, and Matthew Prior, had attempted it here and there and how nearly achieved it: of Milton, again, how he tried to build his Sonnet, redeeming it from the Petrarcan love-business upon the model of the Horatian Ode; how some sonnets of his (familiar or political—that To Mr. Lawrence for instance, as a specimen in one mode, or those To the Lady Margaret Ley, or On the Late Massacre in Piedmont as specimens in another) are deliberately, experimentally Horatian; and how narrowly—how very narrowly—William Cowper, by deflection of religious mania, missed to be our purest Horace of all. But Thackeray is of the band. To alter a word of Carlyle’s, “a beautiful vein of Horace lay struggling about him.”

IV

But, to return upon the first of the two “key-secrets”—Disappointment and Religion—and to leave Religion aside for a moment—I cannot find that, save in his domestic affliction, Thackeray can rightly be called a disappointed man. There is of course a sense—there is of course a degree—in which every one of us, if he be worth anything, arrives at being a disappointed man. We all have our knocks to bear, and some the most dreadful irremediable wounds to bind up and hide. But whatever Thackeray spent or owed at Cambridge (to pay in due time), he took away, with his experience, a most gallant heart. He went to London, lost the rest of his money in journalistic adventures, and fared out as a random writer, without (as they say) a penny to put between himself and heaven. What does he write later on in reminiscence to his mother, but that these days of struggle were the jolliest of all his life?—

That is good gospel. “Fall in love early, throw your cap over the mill; take an axe, spit on your hands; and, for some one, make the chips fly.”

V

But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because—conscious of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only to be acquired through education, he felt that Dickens—whom certain foolish people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival—was all the time outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot see how Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch up with Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came to fruition much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity of Pickwick Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the target’s gold with Vanity Fair. His earlier serious efforts—Catherine, Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs—are sour and green stuff, call them what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is more) deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be masterpieces (which title to two of the three I should certainly deny) where was the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens appealed? Where, outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men and women exist in any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work could, by any possibility, appeal? The dear and maiden lady in Cranford, Miss Jenkyns, as you remember, made allowances for Pickwick in comparison with Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas. “Still perhaps the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become, if he will take the Great Doctor for his model.” But what—what on earth would she have made of Barry Lyndon? And what would good Captain Brown himself have made of it? I can almost better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire Tristram Shandy.

Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance into an affair of the world’s concern. As if anybody mattered to that extent!—

But in literary London there are always (I regret to say) busybodies who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of twenty-seven—Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of The World, a society newspaper—and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth of remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates should be expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before Thackeray’s death, he and Dickens met on the steps of the Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at each other. Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.

Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you—some of the best of you, I hope—may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which, though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty” that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by an eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much impressed by it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I found him taking off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two were musical critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes, pondering, thought that there must really be something naturally akin between music and prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing that the professors of both pelt each other in terms of insult so amazingly similar and with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to recognise even while murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all about, after all?” I suppose the average Musical Review in the weekly papers to contain more mud to the square inch than even The Dunciad! And you must acknowledge, Gentlemen, The Dunciad, for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty wearisome heap of bad breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the country, there is “plenty hair on the hoof.” What I plead is that all we engaged in literature take some warning from the discourtesies of the past, and that you, at any rate, who pass out into literary practice from this Tripos of ours, shall pass out as a confraternity of gentlemen. Consider, if you will, that Literature, our mistress, is a goddess greater than any of us. She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too; Milton and Dry den; Swift, Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith; Pope and John Gay; Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns; Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher, “giving counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I name but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each, in his time, fought for his ideal of her—

Or let me lower the key and put it thus—addressing you as plain apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this, the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary broils and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something, at least, of The Dunciad in your reading for the English Tripos: and I dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:

But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of writing so might have achieved in the long time it had wasted, turning over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen—take the example of poor Hazlitt—contemporary misunderstandings, heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied another man’s success.

“Get David Copperfield,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo, it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (Pendennis) of this month hollow.”

And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo Dickens! it (David Copperfield again) has some of his very prettiest touches—those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a great man of him.”

In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of melancholy not seldom observable in giants.2 Add to this that touch of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight ago; add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek amid any literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first great novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.

It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s

The King on the Tower

VI

This leads us naturally to the second “key-secret” which Mr. Merivale found in Thackeray—his Religion. That is all very well, but what do we understand by it? That Thackeray was very simply devout no reader of his novels will question for a moment. Philip, for instance, flings himself quite naturally on his knees in prayer: and, I am sure, quite as naturally did Thackeray in any moment of trouble, as he might be seen religiously walking with his daughters to public worship. But again, what is prayer? or what was it to Thackeray?—forgive me that I raise this question, since religion has been claimed as one of his two “key-secrets.” What is prayer, then? Is it that which, in Jeremy Taylor, “can obtain everything,” can “put a holy constraint upon God, and detain an angel till he leave a blessing ... arrest the sun in the midst of his course and send the swift-wing’d winds upon our errand; and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed translations which are above the clouds and far beyond the region of the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying man”? Is it with Thackeray so forcible a power as that? Or is it just the humble yet direct petition of the Athenians, commended by Marcus Aurelius—“Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the ploughed fields of the Athenians”—in truth, says the Emperor, for his part, “we ought not to pray at all, or to pray in this simple and noble fashion.”

There is a considerable difference, you see: and for my part I have, searching Thackeray’s works, no doubt that Thackeray’s prayer was ever direct, devout, unabashed and as simple, as anything in Tom Brown’s School Days transferred to a big grown man. You may at most put him down as a guest at the inn of Emmaus. But he lived through the time of Newman, Manning, Martineau; and all I can say is that if Religion involve any conflict at all of the soul, in his novels I detect nothing of the sort: nothing even resembling those spiritual tortures which, afflicting men so various and differing (if you will) in degree as Newman, Clough, and yet later Richard Jefferies, were a real and dreadful burden of the soul to our fathers and grandfathers. Thackeray lived up to the very thick of the conflict: it touched him not. He was devout just as—shall we say?—we elders have known certain Anglo-Indian Captains who went through the Mutiny and during it saw things upon which, coming home, they locked their lips, gallant gentlemen!

So Thackeray walked and knelt, as it seems to me in the very simplest of Creeds. Its summary is no more—and no less—than old Colonel Newcome’s dying Adsum! Says a reviewer in the North British:

VII

I shall attempt in another lecture, Gentlemen, to examine some of Thackeray’s limitations as a novelist; and passing on, to explore the curious, most haunting felicity of his prose. You will have already gathered that I am trying to do what all Professors must and no critic should; which is to discuss an author with whom he has a broken sympathy. The lilt, the cadence, of Thackeray’s prose are to me a rapture, almost. The meanness of his concern with life and his cruelty in handling mean things—as in A Shabby Genteel Story—evoke something like physical nausea. His Paris Sketch Book seems to me about the last word in bumptiousness: his lectures on Swift and on Sterne might, bating reverence for him even in misdeed, be flipped as flies are flipped off a clean page of paper. They needed (as Venables most justly advised) a piano for accompaniment—or a pianola. On the other hand—to omit the great novels—his Roundabout Papers almost touch Horatian perfection.

As for his snobbery—well, I promised you that coming to it, I should waste little of your time. Perhaps I should have called it his “alleged” snobbery, guardedly (as a cautious non-committal journalist once wrote of “an alleged School-Treat”), since my own ears have heard it denied of him. But they have heard with incredulity, since I suppose of this distressing little disease two things to be certain: the first that it is unmistakable, the second that it is incurable. The patient may know—perhaps may feel as acutely as his listeners—that he has it—but in his next sentence it must out: he cannot help himself. Still, it is a human frailty—not ranking in any just condemnation with cruelty (say) or treachery; not worthy to be exalted as a Deadly sin, belonging rather to the peccadilloes about which—if one may misapply Dante’s phrase—we do not reason, but give a look and pass on. Moreover, if you followed the argument of my previous lecture, Thackeray’s was a venial form of the malady because not deliberately acquired, not (as an American said of side-whiskers) “the man’s own fault,” but in his blood, inherited of his Anglo-Indian stock. He never—transferred to Chiswick, the Charterhouse, Cambridge, the Temple, Kensington, Pall Mall—eradicated that family sense of belonging to a governing few set amid an alien race, with a high sense of the duty attached to privilege, but without succour of knowing all sorts and conditions of men and understanding them as neighbours; or let me put it, without just that sense which quite stupid men at home acquire in a Rural Council, or the hunting-field, or a cricket-match on the village green.

I wish we could end with that, and just put it (with W. E. Henley) that Thackeray was ever too conscious of a footman behind his chair. Superficially and in estimating him as a man, that were enough for us. But artistically the trouble goes deeper. There is no reason why an artist should or should not take the squalidest of scenes, provided that the story he sets in it is of serious import. May we agree that of all atmospheres the atmosphere of a cheap boarding-house is perhaps the least inviting—the smell of linoleum and cookery in the well-staircase, the shabby gentility refurbishing itself in the small bedrooms, the pretence, the ceremony at dinner, the rissoles, the talk about the Prince of Wales, the president landlady with “Saturday” written on her brow? Well, Balzac took this sort of thing and made masterpieces of it; and Balzac made masterpieces of it just because he understood that it, also, belonged to human comedy and tragedy, and that there, as well as anywhere else, you may find essentially the wreckage of a King Lear, the dreams of a Napoleon. Thackeray takes a boarding-house merely to savage it, to empty one poor chest-of-drawers after another and hang their pitiable contents on a public wash-line, to hold the dirty saucepans under our noses, to expose the poor servingmaid’s heart along with her hands, its foolish inarticulate yearnings along with her finger-nails—and all for what? That is the point—for what? To tell us that her dreams of a fairy prince oscillated between a flash lodger with a reversible tie and a seedy artist who dropped his “h’s”? We might have guessed that much, surely, without elaborate literary assistance. But suppose the thing worth while, why is the man so cruel about it? His favourite Horace, to be sure, was cruel to his discarded loves. But here is no revulsion of lost love. Here is nothing but gratuitous mocking at a poor girl—

a fifth-rate dabbler in the British gravy—

and nothing else, or nothing we could not have smelt inside the front door. And he finds this worth continuing and expanding into a long novel of Philip!

As a rule, Gentlemen, I hold it idle for a lecturer to talk about an author with whom he has to confess an imperfect sympathy. There are so many others, worth admiring, whom he may help you to admire! But as many of us come to Milton against the grain, conquered by his divine music, so the spell of Thackeray’s prose takes me, often in the moment of angriest revolt and binds me back his slave. I shall try, next time, to speak of its great magic.