Chapter 27

His American visits afforded him much pleasure--and profit too; and he always spoke kindly of us after his return. His light way of expressing his feeling towards us was extremely characteristic, as when he said he hoped he should never be guilty of speaking ill either of the North or the South, as he had been offered equally good claret by both. His frequent allusions to eating and drinking give the idea of a much more convivial person than he really was; he was temperate in both, but he loved to write of these things. In the "Memorials of Gormandizing," he writes in the most appetizing manner of all the good dinners he has eaten in many lands. Each dinner is an epic of the table. They make one hungry with an inappeasable hunger, and make him long to have Thackeray at his own board as a most appreciative guest. He was quite a diner-out in London, and a great favorite wherever he went. He was not one of the professional talkers, but always had one or two good things to say, which he did not repeat until they were stereotyped, as so many do. Though he said witty things now and then, he was not a wit in the sense that Jerrold was. He shone most in little subtle remarks on life, little off-hand sketches of character, and descriptive touches of men and things. He could be uproariously funny on occasion, and even sing his "Jolly Doctor Luther" at table to a congenial company; but he was often very dignified, and always gentlemanly. The bits of doggerel with which he was wont to diversify his conversation are spoken of by all his friends as irresistibly ludicrous, and he seems to have indulged in this pastime from a boy, as he did in those of caricaturing and parodying. Mr. Fields tells us that--

"In the midst of the most serious topic under discussion he was fond of asking permission to sing a comic song, or he would beg to be allowed to enliven the occasion by the instant introduction of a double shuffle. . . . During his first visit to America his jollity knew no bounds, and it became necessary often to repress him when walking in the street. I well remember his uproarious shouting and dancing when he was told that the tickets to his first course of readings were all sold; and when we rode together from his hotel to the lecture-hall, he insisted on thrusting both his long legs out of the carriage window, in deference, as he said, to his magnanimous ticket-holders."

Some of his fun was a little embarrassing to his friends, as when Mr. Fields had taken him to the meeting of a scientific club at the house of a distinguished Boston gentlemen, and Thackeray, being bored by the proceedings, stole into a little anteroom, where he thought no one could see him but his friend, and proceeded to give vent to his feelings in pantomime.

"He threw an imaginary person (myself, of course) upon the floor, and proceeded to stab him several times with a paper-folder which he caught up for that purpose. After disposing of his victim in this way, he was not satisfied, for the dull lecture still went on in the other room, and he fired an imaginary revolver several times at an imaginary head; still the droning speaker proceeded; and now began the greatest pantomimic scene of all, namely, murder by poison, after the manner in which the player King is disposed of in 'Hamlet.' Thackeray had found a small phial on the mantel-shelf and out of it he proceeded to pour the imaginary 'juice of cursed hebenon' into the imaginary porches of somebody's ears. The whole thing was inimitably done, and I hoped nobody saw it but myself; but years afterwards a ponderous fat-witted young man put the question squarely to me: 'What _was_ the matter with Mr. Thackeray that night the club met at M----'s house?'"

Thackeray's playfulness was indeed a marked peculiarity, and innumerable stories are told of his dancing pirouettes, singing impromptu songs, and rhyming a whole company to their infinite amusement. Each one of his personal friends, in talking of him, says, "But if you could only have heard him" at such a time; but of course no one can repeat such unpremeditated jests, and the flavor is gone from them when any one tries to do so. He was the life of the clubs he frequented, and spent much time in them and at theatres, of which he was passionately fond. His duties as a man of fashion took much of his time, and his friends were always wondering when he wrote his books. Much of the jollity and boyish hilarity of his life in society was a rebound from the strain of these books. He was wont to live much, as did Dickens, in the creations of his fancy, and sometimes his emotional nature became overwrought in his work. Mr. Underwood tells us:--

"One day while the great novel of 'The Newcomes' was in course of publication, Lowell, who was then in London, met Thackeray on the street. The novelist was serious in manner, and his looks and voice told of weariness and affliction. He saw the kindly inquiry in the poet's eyes, and said, 'Come into Evans's and I'll tell you all about it. _I have killed the Colonel!_' So they walked in and took a table in a remote corner; and then Thackeray, drawing the fresh manuscript from his breast-pocket, read through that exquisitely touching chapter which records the death of Colonel Newcome. When he came to the final _Adsum_, the tears which had been swelling his lids for some time trickled down his face, and the last word was almost an inarticulate sob."

Thackeray's sensibility was really extreme, and he could not read anything pathetic without actual discomfort,--never could get through "The Bride of Lammermoor," for instance,--and would not listen to any sad tales of suffering in real life if he could escape them. If he did hear of any one in want or distress, he relieved his feelings by instantly appropriating to their use all the money he found himself in possession of at the time. When he was editor of the "Cornhill Magazine," this soft-heartedness was a great drawback to him. He was always paying for contributions he could not use, if they were sent, as so many are, with some pitiful tale accompanying; and was always wasting his valuable time by writing to poor creatures about their dreary verses, which there was no hope of his being able to improve. When quite young, he loaned--or rather gave, though he called it a loan--three hundred pounds to poor old Maginn, when he was beaten in the battle of life and lay in the Fleet Prison. But he denied this act with the utmost vehemence when accused of it, and berated the old fellow in a laborious manner for having been beaten when he should have fought on. Indeed, he was very much ashamed of his soft-heartedness always, and would oftentimes bluster and appear very fierce when appealed to for assistance.

Anthony Trollope tells a story about going to him one day and telling him of the straits to which a mutual friend was reduced.

"'Do you mean to say that I am to find two thousand pounds?' he said angrily, with some expletives. I explained that I had not even suggested the doing of anything,--only that we might discuss the matter. Then there came over his face a peculiar smile, and a wink in his eye, and he whispered his suggestion, as if ashamed of his meanness. 'I'll go half,' he said, 'if anybody will do the rest.' And he did go half at a day or two's notice. I could tell various stories of the same kind."

These things were not easy for him to do; for he was never a rich man, and he had constant calls upon his charity. He kept a small floating fund always in circulation among his poorer acquaintances; and when one returned it to him he passed it to another, never considering it as his own but for the use of the unfortunate. He liked to disguise his charities as jokes,--as filling a pill-box with gold pieces and sending it to a needy friend, with the inscription, "To be taken one at a time, as needed;" and various devices of this kind. He was as generous of his praise as of his money, and always had a good word for his literary friends. His fine tribute to Macaulay will be remembered, and his praise of Washington Irving, of Charlotte Bronté, and many others. While he had an exaggerated contempt for the foibles of the world at large, he had an almost equally exaggerated sympathy for the joys and sorrows of individuals; and much of the scorn which he gives to humanity collectively may be taken as a sort of vent to his feelings when he is ashamed of having been too foolishly weak in dealing with some of these fellow-mortals in real life.

He never encouraged his companions in being cynical, but always encouraged them in admiration. "I am glad he worships anybody," he said, when some friends were satirizing an absent companion for his devotion to a great man. Neither would he encourage any unkind talk about the absent, or laugh at any good hit which was aimed at a friend. "You fiend!" he said to a friend who was laughing over a sharp attack on an acquaintance, and he refused to read or hear a word of it. Indeed, for steadfast loyalty to his friends, his equal has seldom been seen. He made common cause with them in everything, and nothing so enraged him as treachery or deceit among friends.

He was a man of aristocratic feeling, and resented familiarity. He was also in general a reserved man, and allowed few people really to know him. He had a surface nature which was all his mere acquaintances knew. Even his friends were long in finding him out. Douglas Jerrold was once heard to say, "I have known Thackeray eighteen years, and I don't know him yet;" and this was the case with the majority of his friends. His great griefs he kept closely within his own heart, and the more serious side of his nature was all hidden from the world as much as he could hide it. Those who read between the lines discovered it in his books, and those who looked deeply enough into human nature found it in the man, but superficial observers saw only the mocking man of the world. When suddenly observed, his face always had a sad, grave aspect, and it was often hard for him to throw off this seriousness and to put on his harlequin's mask. Upon religious matters he was always reticent, but reverent. Only upon rare occasions would he discuss serious subjects at all, and only with a chosen few. In one letter which has been published he departs from his usual custom and writes:--

"I never feel pity for a man dying, only for survivors if there be such passionately deploring him. You see the pleasures the undersigned proposes to himself here in future years,--a sight of the Alps, a holiday on the Rhine, a ride in the Park, a colloquy with pleasant friends of an evening. If it is death to part with these delights (and pleasures they are, and no mistake), sure the mind can conceive others afterward; and I know one small philosopher who is quite ready to give up these pleasures,--quite content (after a pang or two of separation from dear friends here) to put his hand into that of the summoning angel, and say, 'Lead on, O messenger of God our Father, to the next place whither the divine goodness calls us.' We must be blindfolded before we can pass, I know; but I have no fear about what is to come, any more than my children need fear that the love of _their_ father should fail them. I thought myself a dead man once, and protest the notion gave me no disquiet about myself,--at least the philosophy is more comfortable than that which is tinctured with brimstone."

He hated those who make a stock in trade of their religion, and, like Dr. Johnson, would have advised them to clear their minds of cant; but no genuine evidence of religious feeling or experience was ever treated lightly by him, and he was greatly shocked at any real desecration of sacred things. He had a simple, childlike faith in God and in the Saviour, and a firm hope in the everlasting life.

In person, Thackeray was a tall, ruddy, simple-looking Englishman, with rather a full face, florid, almost rubicund, and keen, kindly eyes, and, after forty, abundant gray hair. He had a conspicuous, almost a commanding figure, with a certain awkwardness in his gait. He had a misshaped nose, caused by an accident in boyhood, and a sarcastic twinkle oftentimes in his eyes, which changed the expression of his whole face.

He dressed well, but unpretendingly, and his voice and manner were always courteous and cordial. He smiled easily, and had a humorous look when not oppressed with sadness, which was often the case in later life. He died suddenly in middle life, leaving, like Dickens, an unfinished novel in the press. No other literary man, save perhaps Macaulay, has been mourned as Thackeray was mourned. There was universal sorrow for his premature loss, and great personal grief among his friends. Twenty-three years have passed since that time, and no successor has arisen to repay the world for that loss. When the curtain fell upon Becky Sharpe and Beatrix, upon Ethel Newcome and the good Colonel, upon Laura and Pendennis, upon Esmond and Warrington, and upon all the deeply studied characters of his mimic stage, that curtain fell to rise no more upon such creatures as his hands had made. He will have no successor. He is the One, the Only. Such pathos, such wit, such wisdom, will not dawn upon us again--in time.

When he wrote Finis for the last time at the close of one of those matchless volumes, it was an epoch closed in the history of literature. When the recording angel wrote Finis at the close of that sad and weary but bravely spent and useful life, it was a sad day for the world of men, who will not look upon his like again. Who that felt a love for the writer and the man could fail to rejoice that the end was quick and painless? One of our own poets has well described the scene:--

"The angel came by night (Such angels still come down), And like a winter cloud Passed over London Town, Along its lonesome streets, Where want had ceased to weep, Until it reached a house Where a great man lay asleep; The man of all his time Who knew the most of men,-- The soundest head and heart, The sharpest, kindest pen. It paused beside his bed And whispered in his ear; He never turned his head, But answered, 'I am here.' Into the night they went; At morning, side by side, They gained the sacred place Where the greatest dead abide; Where grand old Homer sits, In godlike state benign; Where broods in endless thought The awful Florentine; Where sweet Cervantes walks, A smile on his grave face; Where gossips quaint Montaigne, The wisest of his race; Where Goethe looks through all With that calm eye of his; Where--little seen, but light-- The only Shakspeare is! When the new spirit came, They asked him, drawing near, 'Art thou become like us?' He answered, 'I am here.'"

CHARLES DICKENS.

No novelist has dealt so directly with the home life of the world as Charles Dickens. He has painted few historic pictures; he has dealt mostly in interiors,--beautiful bits of home life, full of domestic feeling. Indeed, we may say that his background is always the home, and here he paints his portraits, often like those of Hogarth for strength and grotesque effect. Here, too, he limns the scenes of his comedy-tragedy, and depicts the changing fashions of the time. The color is sometimes a little crude, laid on occasionally with too coarse a brush; but the effect is always lifelike, and our interest in it is never known to flag.

Nowhere else in all the range of literature have we such tender description of home life and love, such intuitive knowledge of child life, such wonderful sympathy with every form of domestic wrong and suffering, such delicate appreciation of the shyest and most unobtrusive of social virtues; nowhere else such indignation at any neglect or desecration of the home, as in Mrs. Jellyby with her mission, in Mrs. Pardiggle with her charities, Mr. Pecksniff with his hypocrisy, and Mr. Dombey with his unfeeling selfishness. In short, Dickens is pre-eminently the prophet and the poet of the home.

Now, can it be possible that we must say of such a man as this, that in his own life he was the opposite of all that which he so feelingly describes,--that he desecrated the very home he so apostrophizes,--that he put all his warmth, geniality, and tenderness into his books and kept for his own fireside his sour humors and unhappy moods,--that he was "ill to live with," as Mrs. Carlyle puts it? We cannot believe it in so bald a form, but we are forced to admit that his married life seems to have been in every way unhappy and unfortunate. No one could state this more strongly than Dickens himself, in the letter he wrote at the time of the separation. He said:--

"Mrs. Dickens and I have lived unhappily for many years. Hardly any one who has known us intimately can fail to have known that we are in all respects of character and temperament wonderfully unsuited to each other. I suppose that no two people, not vicious in themselves, were ever joined together, who had greater difficulty in understanding one another, or who had less in common. An attached woman-servant (more friend to both of us than servant), who lived with us sixteen years and had the closest familiar experience of this unhappiness in London, in the country, in France, in Italy, wherever we have been, year after year, month after month, week after week, day after day, will bear testimony to this. Nothing has on many occasions stood between us and a separation but Mrs. Dickens's sister, Georgina Hogarth. From the age of fifteen, she has devoted herself to our home and our children. She has been their playmate, nurse, instructress, friend, protectress, adviser, companion. In the manly consideration towards Mrs. Dickens, which I owe to my wife, I will only remark of her that the peculiarity of her character has thrown all the children on some one else. I do not know, I cannot by any stretch of fancy imagine, what would have become of them but for this aunt, who has grown up with them, to whom they are devoted, and who has sacrificed the best part of her youth and life to them. She has remonstrated, reasoned, suffered, and toiled, and come again to prevent a separation between Mrs. Dickens and me. Mrs. Dickens has often expressed to her her sense of her affectionate care and devotion in the house,--never more strongly than within the last twelve months."

Again, in the public statement which he prepared for "Household Words," alluding to a multitude of damaging rumors which were quickly put in circulation, he says:--

"By some means, arising out of wickedness or out of folly or out of inconceivable wild chance, or out of all three, this trouble has been made the occasion of misrepresentations most grossly false, most monstrous, and most cruel,--involving not only me, but innocent persons dear to my heart, and innocent persons of whom I have no knowledge, if indeed they have any existence,--and so widely spread that I doubt if one reader in a thousand will peruse these lines by whom some touch of the breath of these slanderers will not have passed like an unwholesome air.

"Those who know me and my nature need no assurance under my hand that such calumnies are as irreconcilable with me as they are in their frantic incoherence with one another. But there is a great multitude who know me through my writings and who do not know me otherwise, and I cannot bear that one of them should be left in doubt or hazard of doubt through my poorly shrinking from taking the unusual means to which I now resort of circulating the truth. I most solemnly declare then--and this I do both in my own name and my wife's name--that all lately whispered rumors touching the trouble at which I have glanced are abominably false; and that whosoever repeats one of them, after this denial, will lie as wilfully and as foully as it is possible for any false witness to lie before heaven and earth."

This denial, coming from a man of truth and honor like Charles Dickens, must, once for all, dispose of that convenient way of accounting for the sad estrangement.

The reasons for the unhappy state of things were of a much more complicated nature than this. Only the most intimate of his friends ever knew them in full, and of course they were debarred from making them public. But Professor Ward of Cambridge University, who has written a very kind and appreciative Life of Dickens, and one which gives a far more pleasing idea of his character than the bulky and egotistical Life by Forster, gives a clue to the whole trouble in the following statement. He says:--

"If he ever loved his wife with that affection before which so-called incompatibilities of habits, temper, or disposition fade into nothingness, there is no indication of it in any of the numerous letters addressed to her. Neither has it ever been pretended that he strove in the direction of that resignation which love and duty made possible to David Copperfield, or even that he remained in every way master of himself, as many men have known how to remain, the story of whose wedded life and its disappointments has never been written in history or figured in fiction."

And this troublous condition of things was very much intensified by Dickens having fallen violently in love with Mary Hogarth, Mrs. Dickens's youngest sister. This beautiful girl died at their house at the early age of seventeen. No sorrow seems ever to have touched the heart and possessed the imagination of Charles Dickens like that for the loss of this dearly loved girl. "I can solemnly say," he wrote to her mother a few months after her death, "that waking or sleeping I have never lost the recollection of our hard sorrow, and I never shall." "If," he writes in his diary at the beginning of a new year, "she was with me now,--the same winning, happy, amiable companion, sympathizing with all my thoughts and feelings more than any one I ever knew did or will,--I think I should have nothing to wish but a continuance of such happiness." Throughout life her memory haunted him with great vividness. After her death he wrote: "I dreamed of her every night for many weeks, and always with a kind of quiet happiness, which became so pleasant to me that I never lay down without a hope of the vision returning." The year before he died he wrote to a friend: "She is so much in my thoughts at all times, especially when I am successful, that the recollection of her is an essential part of my being, and is as inseparable from my existence as the beating of my heart is." In a word, she was the one great imaginative passion of his life. He is said to have pictured her in Little Nell, and he writes after finishing that book, "Dear Mary died yesterday when I think of it."