Part 8

In gardens near the pale of Proserpine, Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....

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

see the children sport upon the shore, And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

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”:

They went about their gravest deeds As noble boys at play.

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_:

Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years’ War.

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:

That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of Geneva. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there.

And later, May 22, 1842:

You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy Head.

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:

I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a _ghaut_, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never to see her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little playmates and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the mother of his Honour the Member of Council.

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--

ἀκαχήμενοι ἦτορ, ἄσμενοι ἐκ θανάτοιο.

“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:

My dear Mama--I hope you are quite well. I have given my dear Grandmama a kiss. My aunt Ritchie is very good to me. I like Chiswick, there are so many good boys to play with. St. James’s Park is a very nice place. St. Paul’s Church, too, I like very much. It is a finer place than I expected. I hope Captain Smyth is well: Give my love to him and tell him he must bring you home to your affectionate little son.

WILLIAM THACKERAY.

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:

“I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t dealing fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it, only that Mr. Henry is so particular.”

“What about the foxes? What is he doing with the foxes?”

“Well, sir, he’s a trapping on ’em. He is, indeed, your reverence. I wouldn’t speak if I warn’t well nigh mortial sure.”

Now the archdeacon had never been a hunting man, though in his early days many a clergyman had been in the habit of hunting without losing his clerical character by doing so; but he had lived all his life among gentlemen in a hunting county, and had his own very strong ideas about the trapping of foxes. Foxes first, and pheasants afterwards, had always been the rule with him as to any land of which he himself had had the management.... But now his heart was not with the foxes,--and especially not with the foxes on behalf of his son Henry. “I can’t have any meddling with Mr. Thorne,” he said; “I can’t and I won’t ... I’m sure he wouldn’t have the foxes trapped.”

“Not if he knowed it, he wouldn’t, your reverence. A gentleman of the likes of him, who’s been a hunting over fifty year, wouldn’t do the likes of that; but the foxes is trapped ... a vixen was trapped just across the field yonder, in Goshall Springs, no later than yesterday morning.” Flurry was now thoroughly in earnest; and, indeed, the trapping of a vixen in February is a serious thing.

“Goshall Springs don’t belong to me,” said the archdeacon.

“No, your reverence; they’re on the Ullathorne property. But a word from your reverence would do it. Mr. Henry thinks more of the foxes than anything. The last word he told me was that it would break his heart if he saw the coppices drawn blank....”

“I will have no meddling in the matter, Flurry.... I will not have a word said to annoy Mr. Thorne.” Then he rode away....

But the archdeacon went on thinking, thinking, thinking. He could have heard nothing of his son to stir him more in his favour than this strong evidence of his partiality for foxes. I do not mean it to be understood that the archdeacon regarded foxes as better than active charity, or a contented mind, or a meek spirit, or than self-denying temperance. No doubt all these virtues did hold in his mind their proper places, altogether beyond contamination of foxes. But he had prided himself on thinking that his son should be a country gentleman.... On the same morning the archdeacon wrote the following note:--

DEAR THORNE,--My man tells me that foxes have been trapped on Darvell’s farm, just outside the coppices. I know nothing of it myself, but I am sure you’ll look to it.--

Yours always, T. GRANTLY.

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--

How spake of old the Royal Seer? (His text is one I love to treat on.) This life of ours, he said, is sheer Mataiotes Mataioteton ..., etc.

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:

As Esmond and the Dean walked away from Kensington discoursing of this tragedy, and how fatal it was to the cause which they both had at heart, the street-criers were already out with their broadsides, shouting through the town the full, true, and horrible account of the death of Lord Mohun and Duke Hamilton in a duel. A fellow had got to Kensington, and was crying it in the square there at very early morning, when Mr. Esmond happened to pass by. He drove the man from under Beatrix’s very window, whereof the casement had been set open. The sun was shining, though ’twas November: he had seen the market-carts rolling into London, the guard relieved at the palace, the labourers trudging to their work in the gardens between Kensington and the City--the wandering merchants and hawkers filling the air with their cries. The world was going to its business again, although dukes lay dead and ladies mourned for them, and kings, very likely, lost their chances. So night and day pass away, and to-morrow comes, and our place knows us not. Esmond thought of the courier now galloping on the North road, to inform him who was Earl of Arran yesterday that he was Duke of Hamilton to-day; and of a thousand great schemes, hopes, ambitions, that were alive in the gallant heart, beating a few hours since, and now in a little dust quiescent.

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.

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--

Cedes coemptis saltibus et domo Villaque--

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--

Since now beside my dinner-board Your voice does never sound, I’ll eat the bit I can afford Afield upon the ground; Below the darksome bough, my love, Where you did never dine, And I don’t grieve to miss you now As I at home do pine.

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.”)