Such, then, as far as weak words can speak of him, is the first and greatest of poets. This is he whom English boys are to be ignorant of, if Greek be ousted from our schools, or are to know only in the distorting mirror of a versified, or in the pale shadow of a prose translation. Translations are good only as teachers to bring men to Homer. English verse has no measure which even remotely suggests the various flow of the hexameter. Translators who employ verse give us a feeble Homer, dashed with their own conceits, and moulded to their own style. Translators who employ prose “tell the story without the song,” but, at least, they add no twopenny “beauties” and cheap conceits of their own.
I venture to offer a few examples of original translation, in which the mannerisms of poets who have, or have not, translated Homer, are parodied, and, of course (except in the case of Pope), exaggerated. The passage is the speech of the Second-sighted Man, before the slaying of the wooers in the hall:—
“Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer? In night are swathed your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls, and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows, and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist sweeps up over all.”
“Ah! wretched men, what ill is this ye suffer? In night are swathed your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls, and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows, and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist sweeps up over all.”
So much for Homer. The first attempt at metric translation here given is meant to be in the manner of Pope:
“Caitiffs!” he cried, “what heaven-directed blightInvolves each countenance with clouds of night!What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?The court is thronged with ghosts that ’neath the gloomSeek Pluto’s realm, and Dis’s awful doom;In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,And sable mist creeps upward from the dead.”
“Caitiffs!” he cried, “what heaven-directed blightInvolves each countenance with clouds of night!What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?The court is thronged with ghosts that ’neath the gloomSeek Pluto’s realm, and Dis’s awful doom;In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,And sable mist creeps upward from the dead.”
This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation could possibly be. But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to be much less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more “classical” in the sense in which Pope is classical:
“O race to death devote! with Stygian shadeEach destined peer impending fates invade;With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,To people Orcus and the burning coasts!Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,But universal night usurps the pole.”
“O race to death devote! with Stygian shadeEach destined peer impending fates invade;With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,To people Orcus and the burning coasts!Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,But universal night usurps the pole.”
Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from his matchless original? “Wretches!” cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and that becomes, “O race to death devote!” “Your heads are swathed in night,” turns into “With Stygian shade each destined peer” (peer is good!) “impending fates invade,” where Homer says nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and “the burning coasts” are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?
The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is—
“What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!”
“What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!”
This is, if possible,moreclassical than Pope’s own—
“With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned.”
“With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned.”
But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating funnily, when, in place of “the walls drip with blood,” he writes—
“With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round.”
“With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round.”
Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add that the ghosts “howl”! I tried to make them gibber, but ghostsdogibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton, Broome, and Co., make them howl.
No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator. The following example, a far-off following of a noted contemporary poet, may be left unsigned—
“Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sinSweeps like a shroud o’er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein;And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet,And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met,Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips,And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of eclipse.”
“Wretches, the bane hath befallen, the night and the blight of your sinSweeps like a shroud o’er the faces and limbs that were gladsome therein;And the dirge of the dead breaketh forth, and the faces of all men are wet,And the walls are besprinkled with blood, and the ghosts in the gateway are met,Ghosts in the court and the gateway are gathered, Hell opens her lips,And the sun in his splendour is shrouded, and sickens in spasm of eclipse.”
The next is longer and slower: the poet has a difficulty in telling his story:
“Wretches,” he cried, “what doom is this? what nightClings like a face-cloth to the face of each,—Sweeps like a shroud o’er knees and head? for lo!The windy wail of death is up, and tearsOn every cheek are wet; each shining wallAnd beauteous interspace of beam and beamWeeps tears of blood, and shadows in the doorFlicker, and fill the portals and the court—Shadows of men that hellwards yearn—and nowThe sun himself hath perished out of heaven,And all the land is darkened with a mist.”
“Wretches,” he cried, “what doom is this? what nightClings like a face-cloth to the face of each,—Sweeps like a shroud o’er knees and head? for lo!The windy wail of death is up, and tearsOn every cheek are wet; each shining wallAnd beauteous interspace of beam and beamWeeps tears of blood, and shadows in the doorFlicker, and fill the portals and the court—Shadows of men that hellwards yearn—and nowThe sun himself hath perished out of heaven,And all the land is darkened with a mist.”
That could never be mistaken for a version by the Laureate, as perhaps any contemporary hack’s works might have been taken for Pope’s. The difficulty, perhaps, lies here: any one knows where to have Pope, any one knows that he will evade themot propre, though the precise evasion he may select is hard to guess. But the Laureate would keep close to his text, and yet would write like himself, very beautifully, but not with an Homeric swiftness and strength. Who is to imitate him? As to Mr. William Morris, he might be fabled to render Α δειλοί “niddering wights,” but beyond that, conjecture is baffled.[91]Or isthisthe kind of thing?—
“Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the night,And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows not delightRings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the walls,Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the halls.Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the liftShudders, and over the midgarth and swan’s bath the cloud-shadows drift.”
“Niddering wights, what a bane do ye bear, for your knees in the night,And your heads and your faces, are shrouded, and clamour that knows not delightRings, and your cheeks are begrutten, and blood is besprent on the walls,Blood on the tapestry fair woven, and barrow-wights walk in the halls.Fetches and wraiths of the chosen of the Norns, and the sun from the liftShudders, and over the midgarth and swan’s bath the cloud-shadows drift.”
It may be argued that, though this is perhaps a translation, it is not English, never was, and never will be. But it is quite as like Homer as the performance of Pope.
Such as these, or not so very much better than these as might be wished, are our efforts to translate Homer. From Chapman to Avia, or Mr. William Morris, they are all eminently conscientious, and erroneous, and futile. Chapman makes Homer a fanciful, euphuistic, obscure, and garrulous Elizabethan, but Chapman has fire. Pope makes him a wit, spirited, occasionally noble, full of points, and epigrams, and queer rococo conventionalisms. Cowper makes him slow, lumbering, a Milton without the music. Maginn makes him pipe an Irish jig:—
“Scarcely had she begun to washWhen she was aware of the grisly gash!”
“Scarcely had she begun to washWhen she was aware of the grisly gash!”
Lord Derby makes him respectable and ponderous. Lord Tennyson makes him not less, but certainly not more, than Tennysonian. Homer, in the Laureate’s few fragments of experiment, is still a poet, but he is not Homer. Mr. Morris, and Avia, make him Icelandic, and archaistic, and hard to scan, though vigorous in his fetters for all that. Bohn makes him a crib; and of other translators in prose it has been said, with a humour which one of them appreciates, that they render Homer into a likeness of the Book of Mormon.
Homer is untranslatable. None of us can bend the bow of Eurytus, and make the bow-string “ring sweetly at the touch, like the swallow’s song.” The adventure is never to be achieved; and, if Greek is to be dismissed from education, not the least of the sorrows that will ensue is English ignorance of Homer.
The editor of a great American newspaper once offered the author of these lines a commission to explore a lost country, the seat of a fallen and forgotten civilisation. It was not in Yucatan, or Central Africa, or Thibet, or Kafiristan, this desolate region, once so popular, so gaudy, so much frequented and desired. It was only the fashionable novels of the Forties, say from 1835 to 1850, that I was requested to examine and report upon. But I shrank from the colossal task. I am no Mr. Stanley; and the length, the difficulties, the arduousness of the labour appalled me. Besides, I do not know where that land lies, the land of the old Fashionable Novel, the Kôr of which Thackeray’s Lady Fanny Flummery is the Ayesha. What were the names of the old novels, and who were the authors, and in the circulating library of what undiscoverable watering-place are they to be found? We have heard of Mrs. Gore, we have heard ofTremayne,and Emilia Wyndham, and theBachelor of the Albany; and many of us have readPelham, or know him out of Carlyle’s art, and those great curses which he spoke. But who was the original, or who were the originals, that sat for the portrait of the “Fashionable Authoress,” Lady Fanny Flummery? and of what work isLords and Liveriesa parody? The author is also credited withDukes and Dejeûners,Marchionesses and Milliners, etc. Could, any candidate in a literary examination name the prototypes? “Let mantua-makers puff her, but not men,” says Thackeray, speaking of Lady Fanny Flummery, “and the Fashionable Authoress is no more. Blessed, blessed thought! No more fiddle-faddle novels! When will you arrive, O happy Golden Age!”
Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that. The Fashionable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the fashionable authoress knows her no more. Thackeray plainly detested Lady Fanny. He writes about her, her books, her critics, her successes, with a certain bitterness. Can it be possible that a world which rather neglectedBarry Lyndonwas devoted toMarchionesses and Milliners? Lady Fanny is represented as having editors and reviewers at her feet; she sits among the flowers, like the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in death. She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her affabilities and condescensions. She gives a reviewer a great garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town. Her adorers compare her to “him who sleeps by Avon.” In one of Mr. Black’s novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of “Log Rollers,” as Mr. Black calls them. This lady appears to myself to be a quite impossible She. One has never met her with her wiles, nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones of those who perished in puffing her. Some persons of rank and fashion have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it. Of course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an applausive hand, and among their acquaintances may be ladies of fashion who write novels; but we read nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady Fanny. The fashionable authoress is nearly extinct, though some persons write well albeit they are fashionable. The fashionable novel is as dead as a door nail:Lothairwas nearly the last of the species. There are novelists who write about “Society,” to be sure, like Mr. Norris; but their tone is quite different. They do not speak as if Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings; their manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a commoner. They are “at ease,” though not terribly “in Zion.” Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage, but it cannot be said that he is always at ease in their society. He remembers that they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a title. Mr. Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope was not afraid of his Dukes: he thought none the worse of a man because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most novelists, they no longer paint fashionable society with enthusiasm. Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the word “beastly,”—a point which does not always impress itself into other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James. In reading him you do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts. But then Tufts are really strange animals to the denizens of the Great Republic. Perhaps the modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much about it; they are not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these strange ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but nobody writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it would not in the least resemble the old fashionable novel.
Here a curious point arises. We have all studied the ingenious lady who calls herself Ouida. Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her early state sublime, the last of the old fashionable novelists, or did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his burlesqueLords and Liveries? Think of the young earl of Bagnigge, “who was never heard to admire anything except acoulis de dindonneau à la St. Menéhould, . . . or the bouquet of a flask of Médoc, of Carbonnell’s best quality, or agoutteof Marasquin, from the cellars of Briggs and Hobson.” We have met such young patricians inUnder Two FlagsandIdalia. But then there is a difference: Ouida never tells us that her hero was “blest with a mother of excellent principles, who had imbued his young mind with that morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world.” But a hero of Ouida’s might easily have had a father who “was struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy.” The heroes themselves may have “looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence.” They do say “Corpo di Bacco,” and the Duca de Montepulciano does reply, “E’ bellissima certamente.” And their creator might conceivably remark “Non cuivis contigit.” But Lady Fanny Flummery’s ladies could not dress as Ouida’s ladies do: they could not quote Petronius Arbiter; they had never heard of Suetonius. No age reproduces itself. There is much of our old fashionable authoress in Ouida’s earlier tales; there is plenty of the Peerage, plenty of queer French in old novels and Latin yet more queer; but where is theélanwhich takes archæology with a rush, which sticks at no adventure, however nobly incredible? where is the pathos, the simplicity, the purple splendour of Ouida’s manner, or manners? No, the spirit of the world, mirroring itself in the minds of individuals, simpered, and that simper was Lady Fanny Flummery. But it did many things more portentous than simpering, when it reflected itself in Ouida.
Is it that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as snobbish as ever, though the gods of our adoration totter to their fall, and “a hideous hum” from the mob outside thrills through the temples. In fiction, on the other hand, the world of fashion is “played out.” Nobody cares to read or write about the dear duchess. If a peer comes into a novel he comes in, not as a coroneted curiosity, but as a man, just as if he were a dentist, or a stockbroker. His rank is an accident; it used to be the essence of his luminous apparition. I scarce remember a lord in all the many works of Mr. Besant, nor do they people the romances of Mr. Black. Mr. Kipling does not deal in them, nor Mr. George Meredith much; Mr. Haggard hardly gets beyond a baronet, andhewears chain mail in Central Africa, and tools with an axe. Mrs. Oliphant has a Scotch peer, but he is less interesting and prominent than his family ghost. No, we have only Ouida left, and Mr. Norris—who writes about people of fashion, indeed, but who has nothing in him of the old fashionable novelist.
Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our fashionable novels—to France and to America. Every third person in M. Guy de Maupassant’s tales has a “de,” and is a Marquis or a Vicomte. As for M. Paul Bourget, one really can be happy with him in the fearless old fashion. With him we meet Lord Henry Bohun, and M. De Casal (a Vicomte), and all the Marquises andMarquises; and all the pale blue boudoirs, and sentimental Duchesses, whose hearts are only too good, and who get into the most complicated amorous scrapes. That young Republican, M. Bourget, sincerely loves ablason, a pedigree, diamonds, lace, silver dressing cases, silver baths, essences, pomatums,le grand luxe. So does Gyp: apart from her wit, Gyp is delightful to read, introducing us to the very best of bad company. Even M. Fortune du Boisgobey likes a Vicomte, and is partial to thenoblesse, while M. Georges Ohnet is accused of entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats. They order these things better in France: they still appeal to the fine old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement. What is Gyp but a Lady Fanny Flummeryréussie,—Lady Fanny with the trifling additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her noble scorn of M. George Ohnet: it is a fashionable arrogance.
To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fashionable novel seems one of the most threatening signs of the times. Even in France institutions are much more permanent than here. In France they have fashionable novels, and very good novels too: no man of sense will deny that they are far better than our dilettantism of the slums, or our religious and social tracts in the disguise of romance. If there is no new tale of treasure and bandits and fights and lions handy, may I have a fashionable novel in French to fall back upon! Even Count Tolstoï does not disdain thegenre. There is some uncommonly high life inAnna Karénine. He adds a great deal of psychology, to be sure; so does M. Paul Bourget. But he takes you among smart people, who have everything handsome about them—titles, and lands, and rents. Is it not a hard thing that an honest British snob, if he wants to move in the highest circles of fiction, must turn to French novelists, or Russian, or American? As to the American novels of theéliteand thebeau monde, their elegance is obscured to English eyes, because that which makes one New Yorker better than another, that which creates the Upper Ten Thousand (dear phrase!) of New York, is so inconspicuous. For example, the scientific inquirer may venture himself among the novels of two young American authors. Few English students make this voyage of exploration. But the romances of these ingenious writers are really, or really try to be, a kind of fashionable novels. It is a queer domain of fashion, to be sure, peopled by the strangest aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most interesting to the philologist. Here poor Lady Fanny Flummery would have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though noble, were moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But these western fashionables have morals and a lingo of their own, made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions transferred from the jargon of Decadence and theParnassiculet Contemporain. As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale to be told—The Last of the Fashionables, who died away, like the buffalo and the grisly bear, in some cañon or forest of the Wild West. I think this distinguished being,Ultimus hominum venustiorum, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux. I see him raised to the rank of chief, and leading the red-skinned and painted cavaliers on the war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy. To depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper and a Ouida. Let me attempt—
By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by the fire of Gatling and Maxim guns. The scrub of Little Big Horn Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves. On the livid and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian horsemen, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of war. The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the streamers of the Northern Lights. Again and again the flower of the United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses. The First Irish Cuirassiers had been annihilated: Parnell’s own, alas! in the heat of the combat had turned their fratricidal black-thorns on M’Carthy’s brigade, and these two gallant squadrons were mixed and broken, falling beneath the blows of brothers estranged.
But at last the fire from the Redmen on the bluff slackened and grew silent. The ammunition was exhausted. There was a movement in the group of braves. Crazy Horse and Bald Coyote turned to Four Hair-Brushes, who sat his steed Atalanta, last winner of the last Grand National, with all the old careless elegance of the Row.
“Four Hair-Brushes,” said Crazy Horse (and a tear rolled down his painted cheek), “nought is left but flight.”
“Then fly,” said Four Hair-Brushes, languidly, lighting a cigarette, which he took from a diamond-studded goldétui, the gift of the Kaiser in old days.
“Nay, not without the White Chief,” said Bald Coyote; and he seized the reins of Four Hair-Brushes, to lead him from that stricken field.
“Vous êtes trop vieux jeu, mon ami,” murmured Four Hair-Brushes, “je ne suis ni Edouard II., ni Charles Edouard à Culloden. Quatre-brosses meurt, mais il ne se rend pas.”
The Indian released his hold, baffled by the erudition and the calm courage of his captain.
“I make tracks,” he said; and, swinging round so that his horse concealed his body, he galloped down the bluff, and through the American cavalry, scattering death from the arrows which he loosed under his horse’s neck.
Four Hair-Brushes was alone.
Unarmed, as ever, he sat, save for the hunting-whip in his right hand.
“Scalp him!” yelled the Friendly Crows.
“Nay, take him alive: a seemlier knight never backed steed!” cried the gallant Americans.
From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the scholar, the hero of sword and pen.
“Yield thee, Sir Knight!” he said, doffing hisképiin martial courtesy.
Four Hair-Brushes replied to his salute, and was opening his curved and delicate lips to speak, when a chance bullet struck him full in the breast. He threw up his arms, reeled, and fell. The gallant American, leaping from saddle to ground, rushed to raise his head.
Through the war-paint he recognised him.
“Great Heaven!” he cried, “it is—”
“Hush!” whispered Four Hair-Brushes, with a weary smile: “let Annesley de Vere of the Blues die unnamed. Tell them that I fell in harness.”
He did, indeed. Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Tellière. It was wet with his life-blood.
“So dies,” said Barry, “the last English gentleman.”
“I thought how some people’s towering intellects and splendid cultivated geniuses rise upon simple, beautiful foundations hidden out of sight.” Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr. Thackeray wrote, after visiting the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, with its “charming, harmonious, powerful combination of arches and shafts, beautiful whichever way you see them developed, like a fine music.” The simile applies to his own character and genius, to his own and perhaps to that of most great authors, whose works are our pleasure and comfort in this troublesome world. There are critics who profess a desire to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the lives of great artists, whether their instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, or the chisel, or the strings and reeds of music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that gossip about Shelley, or Coleridge, or Byron. “Give us their poetry,” we say, “and leave their characters alone: we do not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be happy with ‘The Skylark’ or ‘The Cloud.’” Possibly this instinct is correct, where such a poet as Shelley is concerned, whose life, like his poetry, was as “the life of winds and tides,” whose genius, unlike the skylark’s, was more true to the point of heaven than the point of home. But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray says, a man’s genius must be builded on the foundations of his character. Where that genius deals with the mingled stuff of human life—sorrow, desire, love, hatred, kindness, meanness—then the foundation of character is especially important. People are sometimes glad that we know so little of Shakespeare the man; yet who can doubt that a true revelation of his character would be not less worthy, noble and charming than the general effect of his poems? In him, it is certain, we should always find an example of nobility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen—I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, “meteoric poets” like Byron. The same basis, the same foundations of rectitude, of honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Molière, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows, of Thackeray.
It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never be written. It was his wish to live in his works alone: that wish his descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to Mr. and Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of the man which will be given, at least to this generation. In these Letters all sympathetic readers will find the man they have long known from his writings—the man with a heart so tender that the world often drove him back into a bitterness of opposition, into an assumed hardness and defensive cynicism. There are readers so unluckily constituted that they can see nothing in Thackeray but this bitterness, this cruel sense of meanness and power of analysing shabby emotions, sneaking vanities, contemptible ambitions. All of us must often feel with regret that he allowed himself to be made too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so common in the world he knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and lashed them too complacently. One hopes never to read “Lovel the Widower” again, and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in “The Newcomes.” They are terrible, but not more terrible than life. Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness, gentleness, and pity of Thackeray’s nature. The Letters must open all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome every prejudice.
In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after affection, after love—a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from his natural solace, from the centre of a home.
“God took from me a lady dear,”
“God took from me a lady dear,”
he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made “instead of writing myPunchthis morning.” Losing “a lady dear,” he takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the affections within his reach, in the society of an old college friend and of his wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his own; in a generous liking for all good work and for all good fellows.
Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as Thackeray wrote of Dickens? Artists are a jealous race. “Potter hates potter, and poet hates poet,” as Hesiod said so long ago. This jealousy is not mere envy, it is really a strong sense of how things ought to be done, in any art, touched with a natural preference for a man’s own way of doing them. Now, what could be more unlike than the “ways” of Dickens and Thackeray? The subjects chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than their styles. Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense, but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and resources of language. Dickens copies the chaff of the street, or he roams into melodramatics, “drops into poetry”—blank verse at least—and touches all with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms, of his own. I have often thought, and even tried to act on the thought, that some amusing imaginary letters might be written, from characters of Dickens about characters of Thackeray, from characters of Thackeray about characters of Dickens. They might be supposed to meet each other in society, and describe each other. Can you not fancy Captain Costigan on Dick Swiveller, Blanche Amory on Agnes, Pen on David Copperfield, and that “tiger” Steerforth? What would the family solicitor of “The Newcomes” have to say of Mr. Tulkinghorn? How would George Warrington appreciate Mr. Pickwick? Yes, the two great novelists were as opposed as two men could be—in manner, in style, in knowledge of books, and of the world. And yet how admirably Thackeray writes about Dickens, in his letters as in his books! How he delights in him! How manly is that emulation which enables an author to see all the points in his rival, and not to carp at them, but to praise, and be stimulated to keener effort!
Consider this passage. “Have you read Dickens? O! it is charming! Brave Dickens! It has some of his very prettiest touches—those inimitable Dickens touches which make such a great man of him, and the reading of the book has done another author a great deal of good.”
Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing of Kingsley. “A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a subject heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and simplicity; but with narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave, blue and honest), and with little knowledge of the world, I think. But he is superior to us worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck.”
I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation were over, when “their minds grow grey and bald,” would condescend to tell us the history of their books. Sir Walter Scott did something of this kind in the prefaces to the last edition of the Waverley Novels published during his life. What can be more interesting than his account, in the introduction to the “Fortunes of Nigel,” of how he worked, how he planned, and found all his plots and plans overridden by the demon at the end of his pen! But Sir Walter was failing when he began those literary confessions; good as they are, he came to them too late. Yet these are not confessions which an author can make early. The pagan Aztecs only confessed once in a lifetime—in old age, when they had fewer temptations to fall to their old loves: then they made a clean breast of it once for all. So it might be with an author. While he is in his creative vigour, we want to hear about his fancied persons, about Pendennis, Beatrix, Becky, not about himself, and how he invented them. But when he has passed his best, then it is he who becomes of interest; it is about himself that we wish him to speak, as far as he modestly may. Who would not give “Lovel the Widower” and “Philip” for some autobiographical and literary prefaces to the older novels? They need not have been more egotistic than the “Roundabout Papers.” They would have had far more charm. Some things cannot be confessed. We do not ask who was the original Sir Pitt Crawley, or the original Blanche Amory. But we might learn in what mood, in what circumstances the author wrote this passage or that.
The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary confessions. We hear that Emmy Sedley was partly suggested by Mrs. Brookfield, partly by Thackeray’s mother, much by his own wife. There scarce seems room for so many elements in Emmy’s personality. For some reason ladies love her not, nor do men adore her. I have been her faithful knight ever since I was ten years old and read “Vanity Fair” somewhat stealthily. Why does one like her except because she is such a thorough woman? She is not clever, she is not very beautiful, she is unhappy, and she can be jealous. One pities her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment; one pities her while she sits in the corner, and Becky’s green eyes flatter her oaf of a husband; one pities her in the poverty of her father’s house, in the famous battle over Daffy’s Elixir, in the separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to come to her: it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his tenderness for his own daughter. Yes, Emmy is more complex than she seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various elements of her person and her character. One of them, the jealous one, lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood. Probably this may be the reason why some persons dislike Thackeray so. His very best women are not angels.[109]Are the very best women angels? It is a pious opinion—that borders on heresy.
When the Letters began to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his worst years, in a worldly sense, behind him. They were past: the times when he wrote inGalignanifor ten francs a day. Has any literary ghoul disinterred his old ten-franc articles inGalignani? The time of “Barry Lyndon,” too, was over. He says nothing of that masterpiece, and only a word about “The Great Hoggarty Diamond.” “I have been re-reading it. Upon my word and honour, if it doesn’t make you cry, I shall have a mean opinion of you. It was written at a time of great affliction, when my heart was very soft and humble. Amen. Ich habe auch viel geliebt.” Of “Pendennis,” as it goes on, he writes that it is “awfully stupid,” which has not been the verdict of the ages. He picks up materials as he passes. He dines with some officers, and perhaps he stations them at Chatteris. He meets Miss G---, and her converse suggests a love passage between Pen and Blanche. Why did he dislike fair women so? It runs all through his novels. Becky is fair. Blanche is fair. Outside the old yellow covers of “Pendennis,” you see the blonde mermaid, “amusing, and clever, and depraved,” dragging the lover to the sea, and the nut-brown maid holding him back. Angelina, of the “Rose and the Ring,” is the Becky of childhood; she is fair, and the good Rosalba isbrune. In writing “Pendennis” he had a singular experience. He looked over his own “back numbers,” and found “a passage which I had utterly forgotten as if I had never read or written it.” In Lockhart’s “Life of Scott,” James Ballantyne says that “when the ‘Bride of Lammermoor’ was first put into his hands in a complete shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or conversation it contained.” That is to say, he remembered nothing of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts was as clear as ever. Ballantyne remarks, “The history of the human mind contains nothing more wonderful.” The experience of Thackeray is a parallel to that of Scott. “Pendennis,” it must be noted, was interrupted by a severe illness, and “The Bride of Lammermoor” was dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain. On one occasion Thackeray “lit upon a very stupid part of ‘Pendennis,’ I am sorry to say; and yet how well written it is! What a shame the author don’t write a complete good story! Will he die before doing so? or come back from America and do it?”
Did he ever write “a complete, good story”? Did any one ever do such a thing as write a three-volume, novel, or a novel of equal length, which was “a complete, good story”? Probably not; or if any mortal ever succeeded in the task, it was the great Alexander Dumas. “The Three Musketeers,” I take leave to think, and “Twenty Years After,” are complete good stories, good from beginning to end, stories from beginning to end without a break, without needless episode. Perhaps one may say as much for “Old Mortality,” and for “Quentin Durward.” But Scott and Dumas were born story-tellers; narrative was the essence of their genius at its best; the current of romance rolls fleetly on, bearing with it persons and events, mirroring scenes, but never ceasing to be the main thing—the central interest. Perhaps narrative like this is the chief success of the novelist. He is triumphant when he carries us on, as Wolf, the famous critic, was carried on by the tide of the Iliad, “in that pure and rapid current of action.” Nobody would claim this especial merit for Thackeray. He is one of the greatest of novelists; he displays human nature and human conduct so that we forget ourselves in his persons, but he does not make us forget ourselves in their fortunes. Whether Clive does or does not marry Ethel, or Esmond, Beatrix, does not very greatly excite our curiosity. We cannot ring the bells for Clive’s second wedding as the villagers celebrated the bridal of Pamela. It is the development of character, it is the author’s comments, it is his own personality and his unmatched and inimitable style, that win our admiration and affection. We can take up “Vanity Fair,” or “Pendennis,” or “The Newcomes,” just where the book opens by chance, and read them with delight, as we may read Montaigne. When one says one can take up a book anywhere, it generally means that one can also lay it down anywhere. But it is not so with Thackeray. Whenever we meet him he holds us with his charm, his humour, his eloquence, his tenderness. If he has not, in the highest degree, the narrative power, he does possess, in a degree perhaps beyond any other writer of English, that kind of poetic quality which is not incompatible with prose writing.
A great deal has been said about prose poetry. As a rule, it is very poor stuff. As prose it has a tendency to run into blank verse; as poetry it is highly rhetorical and self-conscious. It would be invidious and might be irritating to select examples from modern masters of prose-poetry. They have never been poets. But the prose of a poet like Milton may be, and is, poetical in the true sense; and so, upon occasions, was the prose of Thackeray. Some examples linger always in the memory, and dwell with their music in the hearing. One I have quoted elsewhere; the passage in “The Newcomes” where Clive, at the lecture on the Poetry of the Domestic Affections, given by Sir Barnes Newcome, sees Ethel, whom he has lost.
“And the past, and its dear histories, and youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks, for ever echoing in the heart and present in the memory—those, no doubt, poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time and parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many years.” “The great gulf of time, and parting, and grief,”—some of us are on the farther side of it, and our old selves, and our old happiness, and our old affections beyond, grow near, grow clear, now and then, at the sight of a face met by chance in the world, at the chance sound of a voice. Such are human fortunes, and human sorrows; not the worst, not the greatest, for these old loves do not die—they live in exile, and are the better parts of our souls. Not the greatest, nor the worst of sorrows, for shame is worse, and hopeless hunger, and a life all of barren toil without distractions, without joy, must be far worse. But of those myriad tragedies of the life of the poor, Thackeray does not write. How far he was aware of them, how deeply he felt them, we are not informed. His highest tragedy is that of the hunger of the heart; his most noble prose sounds in that meeting of Harry Esmond with Lady Castlewood, in the immortal speech which has the burden, “bringing your sheaves with you!” All that scene appears to me no less unique, no less unsurpassable, no less perfect, than the “Ode to the Nightingale” of Keats, or theLycidasof Milton. It were superfluous to linger over the humour of Thackeray. Only Shakespeare and Dickens have graced the language with so many happy memories of queer, pleasant people, with so many quaint phrases, each of which has a kind of freemasonry, and when uttered, or recalled, makes all friends of Thackeray into family friends of each other. The sayings of Mr. Harry Foker, of Captain Costigan, of Gumbo, are all like old dear family phrases, they live imperishable and always new, like the words of Sir John, the fat knight, or of Sancho Panza, or of Dick Swiveller, or that other Sancho, Sam Weller. They have that Shakespearian gift of being ever appropriate, and undyingly fresh.
These are among the graces of Thackeray, these and that inimitable style, which always tempts and always baffles the admiring and despairing copyist. Where did he find the trick of it, of the words which are invariably the best words, and invariably fall exactly in the best places? “The best words in the best places,” is part of Coleridge’s definition of poetry; it is also the essence of Thackeray’s prose. In these Letters to Mrs. Brookfield the style is precisely the style of the novels and essays. The style, with Thackeray, was the man. He could not write otherwise. But probably, to the last, this perfection was not mechanical, was not attained without labour and care. In Dr. John Brown’s works, in his essay on Thackeray, there is an example of a proof-sheet on which the master has made corrections, and those corrections bring the passage up to his accustomed level, to the originality of his rhythm. Here is the piece:—
“Another Finis, another slice of life whichTempus edaxhas devoured! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps, and then an end of Ends. [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.] Oh, the troubles, the cares, theennui, [the complications,] the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-remembered!“[And then] A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold Finis itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning.”“How like music this,” writes Dr. John Brown—“like one trying the same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding all its depths!” The words were almost the last that Thackeray wrote, perhaps the very last. They reply, as it were, to other words which he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield.“I don’t pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young girl in her prime; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it pleases God to send her, depend on it there’s no cause for grief, that’s but an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene climate. Can’t you fancy sailing into the calm?”
“Another Finis, another slice of life whichTempus edaxhas devoured! And I may have to write the word once or twice, perhaps, and then an end of Ends. [Finite is ever and Infinite beginning.] Oh, the troubles, the cares, theennui, [the complications,] the repetitions, the old conversations over and over again, and here and there all the delightful passages, the dear, the brief, the forever-remembered!
“[And then] A few chapters more, and then the last, and behold Finis itself coming to an end, and the Infinite beginning.”
“How like music this,” writes Dr. John Brown—“like one trying the same air in different ways, as it were, searching out and sounding all its depths!” The words were almost the last that Thackeray wrote, perhaps the very last. They reply, as it were, to other words which he had written long before to Mrs. Brookfield.
“I don’t pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young girl in her prime; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it pleases God to send her, depend on it there’s no cause for grief, that’s but an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene climate. Can’t you fancy sailing into the calm?”
Ah! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride, “passionless bride, divine Tranquillity.”
As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth, Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of his life and his writings? So people may ask, and yet how futile is the answer! Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a different reply for each of us. There is not one sphinx, but many sphinxes—as many as there are women and men. We must all answer for ourselves. Pascal has one answer, “Believe!” Molière has another, “Observe!” Thackeray’s answer is, “Be good and enjoy!” but a melancholy enjoyment was his. Dr. John Brown says:
“His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was profoundlymorne, there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in thesæva indignatioof Swift; acting on the kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness.”
A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love. “Ich habe auch viel geliebt,” he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments.
Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. “Did you read theSpectator’ssarcastic notice of ‘Vanity Fair’? I don’t think it is just, but think Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined to deal severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other extreme: to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very well.”
That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms—not to go declaring that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold? Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don’t want to read him? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip,bagatellesnot worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording. Do not let us record them, then.
We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the people, it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and who has lightened so many lives with such merriment as he? But Thackeray wrote, like the mass of authors, for the literary class—for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches will always and inevitably misjudge him.Mais c’est mon homme, one may say, as La Fontaine said of Molière. Of modern writers, putting Scott aside, he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great genius as he was, he was also a penman, a journalist; and journalists and penmen will always look to him as their big brother, the man in their own line of whom they are proudest. As devout Catholics did not always worship the greatest saints, but the friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes burn our cheap incense to St. William Makepeace. He could do all that any of us could do, and he did it infinitely better. A piece of verse forPunch, a paragraph, a caricature, were not beneath the dignity of the author of “Esmond.” He had the kindness and helpfulness which I, for one, have never met a journalist who lacked. He was a good Englishman; the boy within him never died; he loved children, and boys, and a little slang, and a boxing match. If he had failings, who knew them better than he? How often he is at once the boy at the swishing block and Dr. Birch who does not spare the rod! Let us believe with that beloved physician, our old friend Dr. John Brown, that “Mr. Thackeray was much greater, much nobler than his works, great and noble as they are.” Let us part with him, remembering his own words:
“Come wealth or want, come good or ill,Let young and old accept their part,And bow before the awful Will,And bear it with an honest heart.”
“Come wealth or want, come good or ill,Let young and old accept their part,And bow before the awful Will,And bear it with an honest heart.”
“I cannot read Dickens!” How many people make this confession, with a front of brass, and do not seem to know how poor a figure they cut! George Eliot says that a difference of taste in jokes is a great cause of domestic discomfort. A difference of taste in books, when it is decided and vigorous, breaks many a possible friendship, and nips many a young liking in the bud. I would not willingly seem intolerant. A man may not like Sophocles, may speak disrespectfully of Virgil, and even sneer at Herodotus, and yet may be endured. But he or she (it is usually she) who contemns Scott, and “cannot read Dickens,” is a person with whom I would fain have no further converse. If she be a lady, and if one meets her at dinner, she must of course be borne with, and “suffered gladly.” But she has dug a gulf that nothing can bridge; she may be fair, clever and popular, but she is Anathema. I feel towards her (or him if he wears a beard) as Bucklaw did towards the person who should make inquiries about that bridal night of Lammermoor.
But this admission does not mean that one is sealed of the tribe of Charles—that one is a Dickensite pure and simple, convinced and devout—any more than Mr. Matthew Arnold was a Wordsworthian. Dickens has many such worshippers, especially (and this is an argument in favour of the faith) among those who knew him in his life. He must have had a wonderful charm; for his friends in life are his literary partisans, his uncompromising partisans, even to this day. They will have no half-hearted admiration, and scout him who tries to speak of Dickens as of an artist not flawless, no less than they scorn him who cannot read Dickens at all. At one time this honourable enthusiasm (as among the Wordsworthians) took the shape of “endless imitation.” That is over; only here and there is an imitator of the master left in the land. All his own genius was needed to carry his mannerisms; the mannerisms without the genius were an armour that no devoted David had proved, that none could wear with success.
Of all great writers since Scott, Dickens is probably the man to whom the world owes most gratitude. No other has caused so many sad hearts to be lifted up in laughter; no other has added so much mirth to the toilsome and perplexed life of men, of poor and rich, of learned and unlearned. “A vast hope has passed across the world,” says Alfred de Musset; we may say that with Dickens a happy smile, a joyous laugh, went round this earth. To have made us laugh so frequently, so inextinguishably, so kindly—that is his great good deed. It will be said, and with a great deal of truth, that he has purged us with pity and terror as well as with laughter. But it is becoming plain that his command of tears is less assured than of old, and I cannot honestly regret that some of his pathos—not all, by any means—is losing its charm and its certainty of appeal. Dickens’s humour was rarely too obvious; it was essentially personal, original, quaint, unexpected, and his own. His pathos was not infrequently derived from sources open to all the world, and capable of being drawn from by very commonplace writers. Little Nells and Dombeys, children unhappy, overthrown early in themêléeof the world, and dying among weeping readers, no longer affect us as they affected another generation. Mrs. Beecher Stowe and the author of “Misunderstood,” once made some people weep like anything by these simple means. Ouida can do it; plenty of people can do it. Dickens lives by virtue of what none but he can do: by virtue of Sairey Gamp, and Sam Weller, and Dick Swiveller, and Mr. Squeers, with a thousand other old friends, of whom we can never weary. No more than Cleopatra’s can custom staletheirinfinite variety.
I do not say that Dickens’ pathos is always of the too facile sort, which plays round children’s death-beds. Other pathos he has, more fine and not less genuine. It may be morbid and contemptible to feel “a great inclination to cry” over David Copperfield’s boyish infatuation for Steerforth; but I feel it. Steerforth was a “tiger,”—as Major Pendennis would have said, a tiger with his curly hair and his ambrosial whiskers. But when a little boy loses his heart to a big boy he does not think of this. Traddles thought of it. “Shame, J. Steerforth!” cried Traddles, when Steerforth bullied the usher. Traddles had not lost his heart, nor set up the big boy as a god in the shrine thereof. But boys do these things; most of us have had our Steerforths—tall, strong, handsome, brave, good-humoured. Far off across the years I see the face of such an one, and remember that emotion which is described in “David Copperfield,” chap. xix., towards the end of the chapter. I don’t know any other novelist who has touched this young and absolutely disinterested belief of a little boy in a big one—touched it so kindly and seriously, that is there is a hint of it in “Dr. Birch’s School Days.”
But Dickens is always excellent in his boys, of whom he has drawn dozens of types—all capital. There is Tommy Traddles, for example. And how can people say that Dickens could not draw a gentleman? The boy who shouted, “Shame, J. Steerforth!” was a gentleman, if one may pretend to have an opinion about a theme so difficult. The Dodger and Charley Bates are delightful boys—especially Bates. Pip, in the good old days, when he was the prowling boy, and fought Herbert Pocket, was not less attractive, and Herbert himself, with his theory and practice of the art of self-defence—could Nelson have been more brave, or Shelley (as in Mr. Matthew Arnold’s opinion) more “ineffectual”? Even the boys at Dotheboys Hall are each of them quite distinct. Dickens’s boys are almost as dear to me as Thackeray’s—as little Rawdon himself. There is one exception. I cannot interest myself in Little Dombey. Little David Copperfield is a jewel of a boy with a turn for books. Doubtless he is created out of Dickens’s memories of himself as a child. That is true pathos again, and not overwrought, when David is sent to Creakle’s, and his poor troubled mother dare hardly say farewell to him.
And this brings us back to that debatable thing—the pathos of Dickens—from which one has been withdrawn by the attractions of his boys. Little Dombey is a prize example of his pathos. Little Nell is another. Jeffrey, of theEdinburgh Review, who criticised “Marmion” and the “Lady of the Lake” so vindictively, shed tears over Little Nell. It is a matter of taste, or, as Science might say, of the lachrymal glands as developed in each individual. But the lachrymal glands of this amateur are not developed in that direction. Little Dombey and Little Nell leave me with a pair of dry eyes. I do not “melt visibly” over Little Dombey, like the weak-eyed young man who took out his books and trunk to the coach. The poor little chap was feeble and feverish, and had dreams of trying to stop a river with his childish hands, or to choke it with sand. It may be very good pathology, but I cannot see that it is at all right pathos. One does not like copy to be made out of the sufferings of children or of animals. One’s heart hardens: the object is too manifest, the trick is too easy. Conceive a child of Dombey’s age remarking, with his latest breath, “Tell them that the picture on the stairs at school is not Divine enough!” That is not the delirium of infancy, that is art-criticism: it is theAthenæumon Mr. Holman Hunt. It is not true to nature; it is not good in art: it is the kind of thing that appears in Sunday-school books about the virtuous little boy who died. There is more true pathos in many a page of “Huckleberry Finn.” Yet this is what Jeffrey gushed over. “There has been nothing like the actual dying of that sweet Paul.” So much can age enfeeble the intellect, that he who had known Scott, and yet nibbled at his fame, descended to admiring the feeblest of false sentiment. As for Little Nell, who also has caused floods of tears to be shed, her case is sufficiently illustrated by the picture in the first edition (“Master Humphrey’s Clock,”, 1840, p. 210):
“‘When I diePut near me something that has loved the light,And had the sky above it always.’ ThoseWere her words.”“Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead!”
“‘When I diePut near me something that has loved the light,And had the sky above it always.’ ThoseWere her words.”
“Dear, gentle, patient, noble Nell was dead!”
The pathos is about as good as the prose, andthatis blank verse. Are the words in the former quotation in the least like anything that a little girl would say? A German sentimentalist might have said them; Obermann might have murmured them in his weaker moments. Let us try a piece of domestic pathos by another hand. It is the dawn of Waterloo.
“Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed’s foot, and looked at the sleeping girl. How dared he—who was he—to pray for one so spotless! God bless her! God bless her! He came to the bedside, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep, and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face. Two fair arms closed tenderly round his neck as he stooped down. ‘I am awake, George,’ the poor child said, with a sob.”
I know I am making enemies of a large proportion of the readers of this page. “Odious, sneering beast!” is the quotation which they will apply, perhaps unconscious of its origin, to a critic who is humble but would fain be honest, to a critic who thinks that Dickens has his weak places, and that his pathos is one of these. It cannot be helped. Each of us has his author who is a favourite, a friend, an idol, whose immaculate perfection he maintains against all comers. For example, things are urged against Scott; I receive them in the attitude of the deaf adder of St. Augustine, who stops one ear with his tail and presses the other against the dust. The same with Molière: M. Scherer utters complaints against Molière! He would not convince me, even if I were convinced. So, with regard to Dickens, the true believer will not listen, he will not be persuaded. But if any one feels a little shaken, let him try it another way. There is a character in M. Alphonse Daudet’s “Froment Jeune et Rissler Aîné”—a character who, people say, is taken bodily from Dickens. This is Désirée Delobelle, the deformed girl, the daughter ofun raté, a pretentious imbecile actor. She is poor, stunted, laborious, toiling at a small industry; she is in love, is rejected, she tries to drown herself, she dies. The sequence of ideas is in Dickens’s vein; but read the tale, and I think you will see how little the thing is overdone, how simple and unforced it is, compared with analogous persons and scenes in the work of the English master. The idiotic yell of “plagiarism” has been raised, of course, by criticalcrétins. M. Daudet, as I understand what he says in “Trente Ans de Paris,” had not read Dickens at all, when he wrote “Froment Jeune”—certainly had not read “Our Mutual Friend.” But there is something of Dickens’s genius in M. Daudet’s, and that something is kept much better in hand by the Frenchman, is more subordinated to the principles of taste and of truth.
On the other hand, to be done with this point, look at Delobelle, the father of Désirée, and compare him with Dickens’s splendid strollers, with Mr. Vincent Crummles, and Mr. Lenville, and the rest. As in Désirée so in Delobelle, M. Daudet’s picture is much the more truthful. But it is truthful with a bitter kind of truth. Now, there is nothing not genial and delightful in Crummles and Mrs. Crummles and the Infant Phenomenon. Here Dickens has got into a region unlike the region of the pathetic, into a world that welcomeschargeor caricature, the world of humour. We do not know, we never meet Crummleses quite so unsophisticated as Vincent, who is “not a Prussian,” who “can’t think who puts these things into the papers.” But we do meet stage people who come very near to thisnaïvetéof self-advertisement, and some of whom are just as dismal as Crummles is delightful.
Here, no doubt, is Dickens’sforte. Here his genius is all pure gold, in his successful studies or inventions of the humorous, of character parts. One literally does not know where to begin or end in one’s admiration for this creative power that peopled our fancies with such troops of dear and impossible friends. “Pickwick” comes practically first, and he never surpassed “Pickwick.” He was a poor story-teller, and in “Pickwick” he had no story to tell; he merely wandered at adventure in that merrier England which was before railways were. “Pickwick” is the last of the stories of the road that begin in the wandering, aimless, adventurous romances of Greece, or in Petronius Arbiter, and that live with the life of “Gil Blas” and “Don Quixote,” of “Le Roman Comique,” of “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrews.” These tales are progresses along highways bristling with adventure, and among inns full of confusion, Mr. Pickwick’s affair with the lady with yellow curl-papers being a mild example. Though “Tom Jones” has a plot so excellent, no plot is needed here, and no consecutive story is required. Detached experiences, vagrants of every rank that come and go, as in real life, are all the material of the artist. With such materials Dickens was exactly suited; he was at home on high-road and lane, street and field-path, in inns and yeomen’s warm hospitable houses. Never a humour escaped him, and he had such a wealth of fun and high spirits in these glad days as never any other possessed before. He was not in the least a bookish man, not in any degree a scholar; but Nature taught him, and while he wrote with Nature for his teacher, with men and women for his matter, with diversion for his aim, he was unsurpassable—nay, he was unapproachable.
He could not rest here; he was, after all, a child of an age that grew sad, and earnest, and thoughtful. He saw abuses round him—injustice, and oppression, and cruelty. He had a heart to which those things were not only abhorrent, but, as it were, maddening. He knew how great an influence he wielded, and who can blame him for using it in any cause he thought good? Very possibly he might have been a greater artist if he had been less of a man, if he had been quite disinterested, and had never written “with a purpose.” That is common, and even rather obsolete critical talk. But when we remember that Fielding, too, very often wrote “with a purpose,” and that purpose the protection of the poor and unfriended; and when we remember what an artist Fielding was, I do not see how we can blame Dickens. Occasionally he made his art and his purpose blend so happily that his work was all the better for his benevolent intentions. We owe Mr. Squeers, Mrs. Squeers, Fanny Squeers, Wackford and all, to Dickens’s indignation against the nefarious school pirates of his time. If he is less successful in attacking the Court of Chancery, and very much less successful still with the Red Tape and Circumlocution Office affairs, that may be merely because he was less in the humour, and not because he had a purpose in his mind. Every one of a man’s books cannot be his masterpiece. There is nothing in literary talk so annoying as the spiteful joy with which many people declare that an author is “worked out,” because his last book is less happy than some that went before. There came a time in Dickens’ career when his works, to my own taste and that of many people, seemed laboured, artificial—in fact, more or less failures. These books range from “Dombey and Son,” through “Little Dorrit,” I dare not say to “Our Mutual Friend.” One is afraid that “Edwin Drood,” too, suggests the malady which Sir Walter already detected in his own “Peveril of the Peak.” The intense strain on the faculties of Dickens—as author, editor, reader, and man of the world—could not but tell on him; and years must tell. “Philip” is not worthy of the author of “Esmond,” nor “Daniel Deronda” of the author of “Silas Marner.” At that time—the time of the Dorrits and Dombeys—Blackwood’s Magazinepublished a “Remonstrance with Boz”; nor was it quite superfluous. But Dickens had abundance of talent still to display—above all in “Great Expectations” and “A Tale of Two Cities.” The former is, after “Pickwick,” “Copperfield,” “Martin Chuzzlewit,” and “Nicholas Nickleby”—after the classics, in fact—the most delightful of Dickens’s books. The story is embroiled, no doubt. What are we to think of Estelle? Has the minx any purpose? Is she a kind of Ethel Newcome of odd life? It is not easy to say; still, for a story of Dickens’s the plot is comparatively clear and intelligible. For a study of a child’s life, of the nature Dickens drew best—the river and the marshes—and for plenty of honest explosive fun, there is no later book of Dickens’s like “Great Expectations.” Miss Havisham, too, in her mouldy bridal splendour, is really impressive; not like Ralph Nickleby and Monk in “Oliver Twist”—a book of which the plot remains to me a mystery.[128]Pip and Pumblechook and Mr. Wopsle and Jo are all immortal, and cause laughter inextinguishable. The rarity of this book, by the way, in its first edition—the usual library three volumes—is rather difficult to explain. One very seldom sees it come into the market, and then it is highly priced.
I have mentioned more than once the obscurity of Dickens’s plots. This difficulty may be accounted for in a very flattering manner. Where do we lose ourselves? Not in the bare high-road, but among lanes, between hedges hung with roses, blackberries, morning glories, where all about us is so full of pleasure that our attention is distracted and we miss our way. Now, in Dickens—in “Oliver Twist,” in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” in “Nicholas Nickleby”—there is, as in the lanes, so much to divert and beguile, that we cease to care very much where the road leads—a road so full of happy marvels. The dark, plotting villains—like the tramp who frightened Sir Walter Scott so terribly, as he came from Miss Baillie’s at Hampstead—peer out from behind the hedges now and then. But we are too much amused by the light hearts that go all the way, by the Dodger and Crummles and Mrs. Gamp, to care much for what Ralph, and Monk, and Jonas Chuzzlewit are plotting. It may not be that the plot is so confused, but that we are too much diverted to care for the plot, for the incredible machinations of Uriah Heap, to choose another example. Mr. Micawber cleared these up; but it is Mr. Micawber that hinders us from heeding them.
This, at least, is a not unfriendly explanation. Yet I cannot but believe that, though Dickens took great pains with his plots, he was not a great plotter. He was not, any more than Thackeray, a story-teller first and foremost. We can hold in our minds every thread of Mr. Wilkie Collins’ web, or of M. Fortuné du Boisgobey’s, or of M. Gaboriau’s—all great weavers of intrigues. But Dickens goes about darkening his intrigue, giving it an extra knot, an extra twist, hinting here, ominously laughing there, till we get mystified and bored, and give ourselves up to the fun of the humours, indifferent to the destinies of villains and victims. Look at “Edwin Drood.” A constant war about the plot rages in the magazines. I believe, for one, that Edwin Drood was resuscitated; but it gives me no pleasure. He was too uninteresting. Dickens’s hints, nods, mutterings, forebodings, do not at all impress one like that deepening and darkening of the awful omens in “The Bride of Lammermoor.” Here Scott—unconsciously, no doubt—used the very manner of Homer in the Odyssey, and nowhere was his genius more Homeric. That was romance.
The “Tale of Two Cities” is a great test of the faith—that is in Dickensites. Of all his works it is the favourite with the wrong sort! Ladies prefer it. Many people can read it who cannot otherwise read Dickens at all. This in itself proves that it is not a good example of Dickens, that it is not central, that it is an outlying province which he conquered. It is not a favourite of mine. The humour of the humorous characters rings false—for example, the fun of the resurrection-man with the wife who “flops.” But Sidney Carton has drawn many tears down cheeks not accustomed to what Mr. B. in “Pamela” calls “pearly fugitives.”
It sometimes strikes one that certain weaknesses in our great novelists, in Thackeray as well as Dickens, were caused by their method of publication. The green and yellow leaves flourished on the trees for two whole years. Who (except Alexandre the Great) could write so much, and yet all good? Do we not all feel that “David Copperfield” should have been compressed? As to “Pendennis,” Mr. Thackeray’s bad health when he wrote it might well cause a certain languor in the later pages. Moreover, he frankly did not care for the story, and bluffly says, in the preface, that he respited Colonel Altamont almost at the foot of the gallows. Dickens took himself more in earnest, and, having so many pages to fill, conscientiously made Uriah Heap wind and wriggle through them all.
To try to see blots in the sun, and to pick holes in Dickens, seems ungrateful, and is indeed an ungrateful task; to no mortal man have more people owed mirth, pleasure, forgetfulness of care, knowledge of life in strange places. There never was such another as Charles Dickens, nor shall we see his like sooner than the like of Shakespeare. And he owed all to native genius and hard work; he owed almost nothing to literature, and that little we regret. He was influenced by Carlyle, he adopted his method of nicknames, and of hammering with wearisome iteration on some peculiarity—for example, on Carker’s teeth, and the patriarch’s white hair. By the way, how incredible is all the Carker episode in “Dombey”! Surely Dickens can never have intended Edith, from the first, to behave as she did! People may have influenced him, as they influenced Scott about “St. Ronan’s Well.” It has been said that, save for Carlyle, Dickens was in letters a self-taught artist, that he was no man’s pupil, and borrowed from none. No doubt this makes him less acceptable to the literary class than a man of letters, like Thackeray—than a man in whose treasure chamber of memory all the wealth of the Middle Ages was stored, like Scott. But the native naked genius of Dickens,—his heart, his mirth, his observation, his delightful high spirits, his intrepid loathing of wrong, his chivalrous desire to right it,—these things will make him for ever, we hope and believe, the darling of the English people.