Part 10

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.

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:

Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads The ways they walk, by what they speak oppressed

--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 _our_selves 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--

love to see the flaming forge And hear the bellows roar, And catch the burning sparks that fly Like chaff from a threshing-floor:

quite in the fashion of the _Odyssey_, too, where the Wanderers, _and we with them_, make landfall

on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn

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--

And I will be the preacher, And preach, three times a day, To every living creature In North Americay.

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.