THACKERAY (III)
I
I fear, Gentlemen, that you will have to take my earlier remarks to-day with some sympathy for your lecturer’s time of life, even though you refuse that respect for greying hairs which I shall never claim of you. If you hereafter remember at all, you will remember that never from this desk was preached anything but confidence in you, never a word to bind you with any old or middle-aged rules of wisdom. “Earth loves her young,” says Meredith:
—which is well and hopeful and in the way of nature. But since Professors do not come by nature you have to forgive them a certain maturity, a date, a crust in the bottle, and handle them gently if you would know the vintage.
I shall ask you, then, to discount what follows in apparent depreciation of Thackeray: to remind yourselves that we are all too prone to destroy the age just preceding our own; with something of that primitive instinct which (they say), translated into legislation amid the South Seas, commands a grandfather to scale a tree and hold on, if he can, while his prehensile young sway the trunk and jerk it. I do not myself believe in these rude communal tests, that they ever were, or indeed that, even in our time, natural science has arrived, for instance, at any fixable limit for a Professor’s incapacity—and tenacity.
I am simply stating a plain historical fact when I say that the men who were young and practised writing in the later days of Queen Victoria—and as devotedly as any of you can be practising it to-day—found their most peculiar, most dearly cherished, anathema in the “preachiness” of the mid-Victorian novelists—of which “preachiness” Thackeray had been perhaps the most eminent practitioner and exemplar. He confesses it, indeed, in one of the Roundabout Papers. Says he:
Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop perpetually in his story and begin to preach to you? When he ought to be engaged with business, is he not for ever taking the Muse by the sleeve, and plaguing her with one of his cynical sermons? I cry peccavi loudly and heartily. I tell you I would like to be able to write a story which should show no egotism whatever, in which there should be no reflections, no cynicism, no vulgarity (and so forth) but an incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.
II
That last sentence quite misses the point—or at least seemed to miss it quite hopelessly to those who were young in the ’nineties: whose favourite models were French or Russian—Balzac, Stendhal, Mérimée, Flaubert, de Maupassant, Turgueniev, the Tolstoy of Sevastopol and War and Peace.
It is a long while ago: but passions of faith we had; the first commanding us (poor fellows!) to agonise in search of the right or most expressive word; the second to keep ourselves out of any given story making the persons exhibit their characters of themselves and by the actions, the actions again explain themselves by what the persons had said or done previously. In other words these young men attempted to apply to the novel Aristotle’s dictum concerning the Epic, of which they conceived the novel to be (as Fielding had maintained) the artistic successor. (And here let me advise all you who have read the Poetics to study Fielding’s reasoned application of that treatise in his prefaces to the several Books of Tom Jones):
“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as possible. It is not in that way he imitates life. Other writers force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but each distinctively characteristic.”
To put it in another way—and to employ for once a couple of terms which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play—say, as from King Lear or Tartuffe. Madame Bovary and Boule de Suif were the exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as an offence against art.
III
Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for the moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how impatient it made that generation with many things to which their fathers had been prone. Let me mention two or three.
(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions of hero, heroine and others—those page-long introductions to which the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist. The upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows, suggested a Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled, perchance, at the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or again at the pout of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”—well, of some picture of Greuze rather than of some statue or other with which the reader was presumably acquainted. “But as she burst upon Harold’s vision in a gown of some simple soft white clinging material—” and so on. It seemed that a drawing could do that sort of thing better and, for the reader, in one-twentieth part of the time.
(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of course, be judged for what it was—a deliberate and magnificent setting of slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life of man, the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children and seen them pass. And again, as in The Woodlanders all the sap of English woodland—all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad—all its aeolian murmurs in the upper boughs—might be evoked to dignify a most simple country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to enjoy itself in the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings of the tortured breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of the atrabilious or merely bilious, with the avalanche—all this [shall I call it the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors of that gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but inconsiderable slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be “let blood.” In short, lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of vogue along with lengthy descriptions of feminine charms.
(3) Thirdly—and to be very brief about this—the names of invented characters came to be real, or at least plausible names. Such names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt the verisimilitude of their novels—“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr. Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in Vanity Fair—“the Duchess Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire, Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar and Chevalier Tosti”—all in the slang of that day “quite the cheese.” You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but anyhow it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this detestable boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of Brain-worm, Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....
(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s incurable habit of preaching. And here, if we were right (which I shall not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching. An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda, unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report. And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state.
This awful propensity to preaching!—and but yesterday an attempt to force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments a year—a gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!
Let me illustrate. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story, Treasure Island, over which a number of those young men of whom I have been talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale neatly as (they held) a tale should be told. But Treasure Island cut (as they say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the General Public and made Stevenson popular was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that because the General Public read into it a religious lesson which the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having ever in him a strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a
something of the Shorter Catechist,
gave way to preachment—to the composition of collects and Christmas sermons and (as apparently any of us can do—it is a career open to all the talents) thereby attracted audiences. But where had gone the economy of description, the directness of narrative, the sudden incisiveness of a speaking voice? Take this, for example, of the Hispaniola’s working her way in to anchorage:
All the way in, Long John stood by the steersman and conned the ship. He knew the passage like the palm of his hand; and though the man in the chains got everywhere more water than was down in the chart, John never hesitated once.
“There’s a strong scour with the ebb,” he said, “and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade.”
We brought up just where the anchor was in the chart, about a third of a mile from either shore, the mainland on one side, and Skeleton Island on the other. The bottom was clean sand. The plunge of our anchor sent up clouds of birds wheeling and crying over the woods; but in less than a minute they were down again, and all was once more silent.
The place was entirely land-locked, buried in woods, the trees coming right down to a high-water mark, the shores mostly flat, and the hill-tops standing round at a distance in a sort of amphitheatre, one here, one there. Two little rivers, or rather, two swamps, emptied out into this pond, as you might call it; and the foliage round that part of the shore had a kind of poisonous brightness. From the ship we could see nothing of the house or stockade, for they were quite buried among trees; and if it had not been for the chart on the companion, we might have been the first that had ever anchored there since the island arose out of the seas.
There was not a breath of air moving, nor a sound but that of the surf booming half a mile away along the beaches and against the rocks outside. A peculiar stagnant smell hung over the anchorage—a smell of sodden leaves and rotting tree-trunks. I observed the doctor sniffing and sniffing like some one tasting a bad egg.
“I don’t know about treasure,” he said, “but I’ll stake my wig there’s fever here.”
You will remark, first, how the mere description moves with the story, following the crew in and just noting the landscape as they saw it after the long sea-passage: quite in the fashion of Homer who (as Lessing observed) does not in the Iliad weary with any long description of the finished shield of Achilles but coaxes us up to the forge of Hephaestus, so that like the children at the open door of Longfellow’s village smithy we see the work shaping under the workman’s hammer, and—forgive the trite old verse—
quite in the fashion of the Odyssey, too, where the Wanderers, and we with them, make landfall
and beach the black ship and disembark and wonder at cliff, glade and waterfall, we wondering (that is) through their eyes.
You will remark, secondly, in the casual passage I quoted, how the very few words spoken—those by John Silver, the villain, those by the Doctor who is the true punctum indifferens, the normal sane man of the story as truly as is Horatio in Hamlet—bite in, as by sharp acid, the impression of the story—the meaning of it, at that moment, to the mutineer and to the simply honest man.
Am I comparing small things with great? Why, Gentlemen, of course I am, and purposely; to convince you, if I can, that in small as in great—the same laws rule true narrative art.
IV
So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant—
For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that he wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”
I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an “incident”? A murder—say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness; a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern over a reopened grave—all these are incidents and rather obviously so. But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—just that, and if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself—albeit he could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond breaks his sword—in that very book achieves his topmost height, his most unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a brilliant girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-whispered in French, at the foot of it—as we shall see, by and by.
V
No: I dare to say that this gift of loose, informal, preaching was Thackeray’s bane as a novelist. The ease with which it came to him, and the public’s readiness to accept it, just tempted him to slouch along. Esmond and the first half of Vanity Fair excepted, he never seems (to me at least) to have planned out a novel. He could not sit at home, in his desolated house, and concentrate himself upon a close-knit artistic design: but wrote, as I have said, in hotels or “upon Club paper,” usually behind-time and (as the saying is) with the printer’s devil at his elbow: and so this great melancholy man could, out of his melancholy and his genius, curiously matched with it, of vivacious talk summon up ream upon ream at call. Heaven forbid this should suggest that when he came to facts—more especially when he dealt with his beloved eighteenth century—he was careless. On the contrary, he knew it familiarly as a hand knows its glove. I suppose no later writer (with the possible exception of Austin Dobson) has understood the earlier half of that century better. For certain, again, no writer has, comparably with Thackeray, revivified it. Scholars are always on the pad, with dark lanterns, to catch out writers of imagination: but I observe that these Proctors, encountering Thackeray, carefully edge to the other side of the street. I cannot find that anything in Barry Lyndon, Esmond, The Virginians, the opening of Denis Duval, has ever been seriously challenged by the pedants: and considering Thackeray’s fame and the minute jealousy of pedants, that is a fairly fine record. In the famous chapters on Brussels and Waterloo in Vanity Fair, so far as I discover, every record confirms, not one contradicts, his story.
Again, as it seems to me, this feebleness in construction—this letting the story go at hazard and filling out with chat or preaching—this lazy range of invention in plot—matches with limits in the range of his characters. Here again he is always impeccable when dealing with an Anglo-Indian retired, whether it be Jos. Sedley or Colonel Newcome—high or low; or with a Foker or a Costigan or anyone he has encountered in his own Bohemian life, or in a Pall Mall Club or in an Irish regiment or in any dingy lodging-house, at home or abroad. Any inhabitant of these haunts, haunts of his actual experience, he can exhibit and experiment upon with infinite variety. Within that range, you can say, he almost never went wrong. He could there convert all particulars to a Universal. No shadow of doubt can rest on the literal and actual truth of an anecdote he puts into De Finibus, one of his best Roundabout Papers.
“I was smoking,” says he, “in a tavern parlour one night, and this Costigan came into the room alive, the very man; the most remarkable resemblance of the printed sketches of the man, of the rude drawings in which I had depicted him. He had the same little coat, the same battered hat, cocked on one eye, the same twinkle in that eye. ‘Sir,’ said I, knowing him to be an old friend whom I had met in unknown regions—‘Sir,’ I said, ‘may I offer you a glass of brandy-and-water?’ ‘Bedad ye may,’ says he, ‘and I’ll sing ye a song tu.’ Of course he spoke with an Irish brogue. Of course he had been in the army. In ten minutes he pulled out an army agent’s account, whereon his name was written. A few months later we read of him in a police court. How had I come to know him, to divine him? Nothing shall convince me that I have not seen that man in the world of spirits....”
They used (he adds) to call the good Sir Walter the “Wizard of the North.” What if some writer should appear who can write so enchantingly that he shall be able to call into actual life the people whom he invents?... Well, I think Thackeray could do that: but only, I think, in the small district limited by the Haymarket on the east and Kensington Gardens on the west. He could call spirits from the vasty deep of the Cider Cellars, evoke them from the shadowy recesses of the Reform or the Athenaeum Club. But, like Prospero, he had to draw a ring around him before his best incantations worked. The cautious Trollope remarks that his Sir Pitt Crawley “has always been to me a stretch of audacity which I have been unable to understand. But it has been accepted.” Yes, to be sure, it has been accepted, and old Sir Pitt is wickedly alive and breathing just because (on Thackeray’s own confession) he was drawn from the life. But as a rule, if you take his dukes and duchesses you will find him on ticklish ground, even so far northward as Mayfair, apt (shall we say?) to buttonhole the butler. Always saving Esmond and a part of The Virginians, I ask you to compare anything in Thackeray with the opening of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, and you will detect at once which author is dealing with what he supposes and which with what is known to him, so familiar that he cannot mistake his people even as he enters a room.
VI
But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course, his propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing” style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our Burke practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a narrative style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask ourselves why Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending all envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run as if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream) the man were kicking up a bedroom slipper and catching it again on his toe. The secret lies, if you will follow his sentences and surrender yourselves to their run and lull and lapse, in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce any other writer of English prose has quite the natural, effortless, command. You have no need to search in his best pages, or to hunt for his purple patches. It has a knack of making music even while you are judging his matter to be poor stuff; music—and frequent music—in his most casual light-running sentences. I protest, Gentlemen, I am not one of your pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt fellows: I grudge no man saying a thing of mine before me, even when I know it must be valuable because the anticipator is Mr. George Saintsbury; and so far am I from wishing him to perish that one of my sustaining hopes of life is that of congratulating him on his hundredth birthday. (Do not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be from this desk.) But I protest also that in his History of English Prose Rhythm he surprised a secret which was mine, and shy as love—the conviction that for mastery—unconscious, native mastery, it may be—of “that other rhythm of prose”—no English writer excels Thackeray, and a very few indeed approach him. So you guess that I have to deal at once with a sense of gratitude and a grudge that my secret can now stand expressed and confirmed by so high an authority: and my grudge I shall work off by quoting him.
“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that I certainly do not know any one with so various and pervasive a command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh! you are, if not a maniac, at any rate a maniaque.’ Nevertheless, I say it; and will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about Thackeray is his mastery of that mixed style, ‘shot with rhythm.’ Even in his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will rarely find a discordant sentence—the very vulgarisms and misspellings come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and are uttered in a musical voice. As there never was a much hastier writer, it is clear that the man thought in rhythm—that the words, as they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with them. Even his blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I think, in any one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for burlesque purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say, ‘breed’ about them, which some very respectable ‘poets’ have never achieved.”
He quotes a short beautiful passage from Vanity Fair—
She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of helping on the preparations for the departure [for Waterloo where let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall and lie, with a bullet through his heart], and showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and followed him to and fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as the packing proceeded. She came out and stood leaning at the wall, holding this sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped like a large stain of blood.
He proceeds:
Take another and shorter—not, I hope, impudently short “Becky was always good to him, always amused, never angry.”
Anybody can do that? Perhaps; but please find something like it for me before 1845, and out of Thackeray, if you will kindly do so. In him it is everywhere.
But, for the cadence of it—since all true prose demands prolonged cadences—let me try to read you a passage or two from the exquisite sixth and seventh chapters of Esmond. Harry Esmond is home from his campaigning, has been to service in the old cathedral, and meets his dear mistress outside as the service is done and over. Mark, I say, the cadences of that scene of reconciliation—
She gave him her hand, her little fair hand: there was only her marriage ring on it. The quarrel was all over. The year of grief and estrangement was passed. They never had been separated. His mistress had never been out of his mind all that time. No, not once. No, not in the prison; nor in the camp; nor on shore before the enemy; nor at sea under the stars of solemn midnight; nor as he watched the glorious rising of the dawn: not even at the table, where he sat carousing with friends, or at the theatre yonder, where he tried to fancy that other eyes were brighter than hers. Brighter eyes there might be, and faces more beautiful, but none so dear—no voice so sweet as that of his beloved mistress, who had been sister, mother, goddess to him during his youth—goddess now no more, for he knew of her weaknesses; and by thought, by suffering, and that experience it brings, was older now than she; but more fondly cherished as woman perhaps than ever she had been adored as divinity. What is it? Where lies it? the secret which makes one little hand the dearest of all? Who ever can unriddle that mystery? Here she was, her son by his side, his dear boy. Here she was, weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt her tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation.
They walked as though they had never been parted, slowly, with the grey twilight closing round them.
“And now we are drawing near to home,” she continued, “I knew you would come, Harry, if—if it was but to forgive me for having spoken unjustly to you after that horrid—horrid misfortune. I was half frantic with grief then when I saw you. And I know now—they have told me. That wretch, whose name I can never mention, even has said it: how you tried to avert the quarrel, and would have taken it on yourself, my poor child: but it was God’s will that I should be punished, and that my dear lord should fall.”
“He gave me his blessing on his death-bed,” Esmond said. “Thank God for that legacy!”
“Amen, amen! dear Henry,” said the lady, pressing his arm. “I knew it. Mr. Atterbury, of St. Bride’s, who was called to him, told me so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since remembered it.”
“You had spared me many a bitter night, had you told me sooner,” Mr. Esmond said.
“I know it, I know it,” she answered, in a tone of such sweet humility, as made Esmond repent that he should ever have dared to reproach her. “I know how wicked my heart has been; and I have suffered too, my dear. I confessed to Mr. Atterbury—I must not tell any more. He—I said I would not write to you or go to you—and it was better even that, having parted, we should part. But I knew you would come back—I own that. That is no one’s fault. And to-day, Henry, 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, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come 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.”
She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked up at him. The moon was up by this time, glittering keen in the frosty sky. He could see for the first time now clearly, her sweet careworn face.
“Do you know what day it is?” she continued. “It is the 29th of December—it is your birthday! But last year we did not drink it—no, no. My lord was cold, and my Harry was likely to die: and my brain was in a fever; and we had no wine. But now—now you are come again, bringing your sheaves with you, my dear.” She burst into a wild flood of weeping as she spoke: she laughed and sobbed on the young man’s heart, crying out wildly, “bringing your sheaves with you—your sheaves with you!”
So they fare to the lit house, and to the tragedy which is the tragedy of all womankind; of beauty fading while desire endures, the passion to be loved persists; most tragic of all when a mother meets in a daughter her careless conquering rival.
As they came up to the house at Walcote, the windows from within were lighted up with friendly welcome; the supper-table was spread in the oak parlour; it seemed as if forgiveness and love were awaiting the returning prodigal. Two or three familiar faces of domestics were on the look-out at the porch—the old housekeeper was there, and young Lockwood from Castlewood, in my lord’s livery of tawny and blue. His dear mistress pressed his arm as they passed into the hall. Her eyes beamed out on him with affection indescribable. “Welcome,” was all she said, as she looked up, putting back her fair curls and black hood. A sweet rosy smile blushed on her face; Harry thought he had never seen her look so charming. Her face was lighted with a joy that was brighter than beauty—she took a hand of her son, who was in the hall waiting his mother—she did not quit Esmond’s arm.
“Welcome, Harry!” my young lord echoed after her. “Here we are all come to say so. Here’s old Pincot: hasn’t she grown handsome?” and Pincot, who was older, and no handsomer than usual, made a curtsey to the Captain, as she called Esmond, and told my lord to “Have done, now.”
“And here’s Jack Lockwood. He’ll make a famous grenadier, Jack; and so shall I; we’ll both ’list under you, Cousin. As soon as I am seventeen, I go to the army—every gentleman goes to the army. Look! who comes here—ho, ho!” he burst into a laugh. “’Tis Mistress Trix, with a new ribbon; I knew she would put one on as soon as she heard a captain was coming to supper.”
This laughing colloquy took place in the hall of Walcote House, in the midst of which is a staircase that leads from an open gallery, where are the doors of the sleeping chambers: and from one of these, a wax candle in her hand, and illuminating her, came Mistress Beatrix—the light falling indeed upon the scarlet ribbon which she wore, and upon the most brilliant white neck in the world.
Esmond had left a child and found a woman, grown beyond the common height, and arrived at such a dazzling completeness of beauty, that his eyes might well show surprise and delight at beholding her. In hers there was a brightness so lustrous and melting, that I have seen a whole assembly follow her as if by an attraction irresistible: and that night the great Duke was at the playhouse after Ramillies, every soul turned and looked (she chanced to enter at the opposite side of the theatre at the same moment) at her, and not at him. She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair and eyebrows and eye-lashes were dark: her hair curling with rich undulations, and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full, and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace—agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen—now melting, now imperious, now sarcastic—there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again, and remembers a paragon.
So she came holding her dress with one fair rounded arm, and her taper before her, tripping down the stair to greet Esmond.
“She hath put on her scarlet stockings and white shoes,” says my lord, still laughing. “Oh, my fine mistress! is this the way you set your cap at the Captain?” She approached, shining smiles upon Esmond, who could look at nothing but her eyes. She advanced holding forward her head, as if she would have him kiss her as he used to do when she was a child.
“Stop,” she said, “I am grown too big! Welcome, Cousin Harry,” and she made him an arch curtsey, sweeping down to the ground almost, with the most gracious bend, looking up the while with the brightest eyes and sweetest smile. Love seemed to radiate from her. Harry eyed her with such a rapture as the first lover is described as having by Milton.
“N’est-ce pas?” says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging on his arm.
Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of the filia pulcrior.
I have said some hard things, Gentlemen, upon Thackeray and have indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so reticently bring those two scenes into contrast—with all its meaning—all meaning—modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and intelligence wedded in human speech—well, to that man I conclude by bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose.