Studies in Literature and History
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Title: Studies in Literature and History
Author: Sir Alfred C. Lyall
Editor: John O. Miller
Release date: June 30, 2008 [eBook #25937]
Language: English
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STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND HISTORY
by the Late
SIR ALFRED C. LYALL
P.C., G.C.I.E., K.C.B., D.C.L., LL.D.
London
John Murray, Albemarle Street, W.
1915
PREFACE
In the Second Series of his _Asiatic Studies_ the late Sir Alfred
Lyall republished a number of articles that he had contributed to
various Reviews up to the year 1894. After that date he wrote
frequently, especially for the _Edinburgh Review_, and he left amongst
his papers a note naming a number of articles from which he considered
that a selection might be made for publication.
The present volume contains, with two exceptions, the articles so
mentioned, together with one that was not included by the author.
A large number of Sir Alfred Lyall's contributions[1] to the Reviews
deal, as might be expected, with India--with its political and
administrative problems, or with the careers of its statesmen and
soldiers. He appears, however, to have regarded such articles as not
of sufficient permanent value for republication, and his selection was
confined almost exclusively to writings on literary, historical or
religious subjects. He made an exception in favour of an essay on his
old friend Sir Henry Maine; but as the limitations imposed by the
publisher made it necessary to sacrifice one of the larger articles,
this essay was, with some reluctance, excluded. It dealt chiefly with
Maine's influence on Indian administration and legislation; and would
more appropriately be included in a collection of his writings on
India, should these ever be published.
While Indian official subjects have been excluded, readers of the
earlier 'Studies' will recognise that many of the writings in this
volume follow out lines of thought suggested in the earlier works, or
apply in a larger sphere the results of observations made when the
author was studying Indian myths and Indian religions in Berar, or the
'rare and antique stratification of society' in Rajputana. The two
addresses on religion placed at the end of the volume form the most
obvious example, but there is a close connection between a group of
the other articles and the views developed in _Asiatic Studies_.
In the last edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was
inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views
'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that
may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid
survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through
the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At
their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and
again, 'There is always a certain quantity of fable in history, and
there is always an element of history in one particular sort of
fable.' The reviews of English and Anglo-Indian fiction, and of
'Heroic Poetry' in the present work, give opportunities of further
illustrations from fiction of his views: which reappear from another
standpoint in the 'Remarks on the Reading of History'--a short
address, which it has been thought worth while to reprint, though it
was not specially indicated by the author for publication.
Several of the other articles contain criticism of a more purely
literary character; the article on 'Frontiers,' which recounts
exciting but little-known episodes in the Russian advance in Asia, has
an important bearing on a branch of Indian policy in which Sir Alfred
Lyall to the end of his career took a deep interest, and of which he
had a profound knowledge; and 'L'Empire Liberal' may, it is thought,
be found to contain much that is of special interest at the present
time.
These articles have not had the benefit of any general revision by
their author, but in a few cases he had indicated in the printed
copies alterations or additions that he desired to be made.
_The Quarterly._
_The Anglo-Saxon._
_The Edinburgh._
_The Fortnightly._
Except that the two essays on 'Race and Religion' and 'The State in
its Relation to Religion' have been brought together at the end of the
volume, the chronological order of original publication has been
observed. The source from which each article is drawn has in all cases
been indicated, and this opportunity is taken of acknowledging the
permission to republish that has courteously been accorded by the
editors or proprietors of the Reviews concerned.
Permission has also been given to publish the article on 'Sir Spencer
Walpole' written for the British Academy, and the address on the
'Reading of History.'
John O. Miller
_December 1914._
CONTENTS
PAGE
NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS 1
ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 34
THACKERAY 76
THE ANGLO-INDIAN NOVELIST 121
HEROIC POETRY 155
THE WORKS OF LORD BYRON 177
THE ENGLISH UTILITARIANS 210
CHARACTERISTICS OF MR. SWINBURNE'S POETRY 263
FRONTIERS ANCIENT AND MODERN 291
L'EMPIRE LIBERAL 328
SIR SPENCER WALPOLE 368
REMARKS ON THE READING OF HISTORY 377
RACE AND RELIGION 399
THE STATE IN ITS RELATION TO EASTERN AND WESTERN RELIGIONS 427
INDEX 454
NOVELS OF ADVENTURE AND MANNERS[2]
Mr. Raleigh[3] very rightly goes back to mediaeval romance for the
origins of English fiction. In all countries the metrical tale is many
generations older than the prose story; for prose writing is a
refinement of the literary art which flourishes only when reading has
become popular; while verse, being at first a kind of _memoria
technica_ used for the correct transmission of sacred texts and the
heroic tradition, strikes the ear and fixes the recollection of an
audience. The exploits of mighty warriors and the miracles of
saints--love, fighting, and theology--form the subject matter of these
stories in verse. They are, as Mr. Raleigh says, epical in spirit
though not in form: 'they carry their hero through the actions and
adventures of his life ... they display a marked preference for deeds
done, and attempt no character-drawing.... A sense of the instability
of human life, very present to the minds of men familiar with battle
and plague, is everywhere mirrored in these romances.' Then came
Chaucer, who not only wrote prose tales, but also carried far toward
perfection the art of narration in verse; and 'in the fifteenth
century both of the ancestors of the modern novel--that is, the
novella or short pithy story after the manner of the Italians, and
the romance of chivalry--appear in an English prose dress.' But the
genius of English fiction was still loaded with the chains of allegory
and pedantic moralisation; and in the _Gesta Romanorum_, the most
popular collection of English prose stories which had been translated
from the Latin at the end of the fifteenth century, 'human beings are
mere puppets, inhabiting the great fabric of mediaeval thought and
mediaeval institution.... It was the work of the Renaissance to recover
the literal and obvious sense of human life, as it was the work of the
closely-allied Reformation to recover the literal sense of the Bible.'
The playwright has always been a formidable rival to the novelist,
insomuch that in a period of dramatic activity the novel, as our
author remarks, can hardly maintain itself. But from the middle of the
seventeenth century the stage had fallen low, while the formal and
fantastic romance, the long-winded involved story, was losing its
vogue. So the heroic romances, we are told, 'availed themselves
skilfully of the opportunity to foster a new taste in the reading
public--a delight, namely, born of the fashionable leisure of a
self-conscious society, in minute introspection, and the analysis and
portraiture of emotional states.' We are inclined to suspect that
these words, which would serve well enough to describe the taste for
the analytic novel of our own day, must be taken with considerable
reserve in their application to the writings and the readers of two
centuries ago. But we may agree that certain tendencies of style and
developments of feeling which are now predominant may be traced back
to this time. And when, toward the end of the seventeenth century,
Mrs. Aphra Behn began to enlist incidents of real life into the
service of her fiction, she was making a distinct attempt, as Mr.
Raleigh points out, to bring romance into closer relation with
contemporary life, although a conventional treatment of facts and
character still overlay all her work. Mr. Raleigh holds, however, that
this attempt was abortive; that it failed at the time; and that the
great eighteenth-century school of English novelists, with Richardson
and Fielding at their head, took its rise, quite independently of
predecessors in the seventeenth century, out of the general stock of
miscellaneous literature--plays, books of travel, adventures, satires,
journals, and broadsides--which had been drawn at first hand from
observation and experience of the various forms of surrounding life.
We are quite ready to agree that the eighteenth-century Novel of
Manners belongs to a family distinct from that of the Romantic story,
or is at any rate very distantly connected with it. But when Mr.
Raleigh goes on to say that the heroic romance died in the seventeenth
century and left no issue, although it was revived again in the latter
half of the eighteenth century, to this view we are much inclined to
demur. Such complete interruptions in the transmission of species are
as rare in the intellectual as in the physical world; and we prefer to
maintain that the romance, although it was for a time eclipsed by the
brilliancy of the writers who described the manners and sentiments of
contemporary society, was never extinguished, but became transformed
gradually, by successive modifications of environment, into the modern
novel of adventure. It is true that Defoe entirely rejected the
marvellous, while Horace Walpole, fifty years later, dealt
immoderately in the elements of mystery and wonder; yet,
notwithstanding these violent oscillations of style and method, we
believe that the great historical novels of the early nineteenth
century, and the tales of stirring incident which flourish at the
present day, descend by an unbroken filiation from the fabulous
romance of elder times.
Mr. Raleigh does not carry his brief yet instructive history of the
English novel beyond the time of Walter Scott, with whom, he says,
'the wheel has come full circle,' the Romantic revival was victorious,
prose finally superseded verse as the vehicle of adventurous story,
and realism was wedded to romance. We trust that in some future work
he will carry on up to a later date his survey of the course and
currents of imaginative fiction. In the meantime, it may not be
irrelevant to follow up further and a little more closely the ruling
characteristics and the formative influences that have contributed
toward the production of English light literature as it exists at the
present day.
The novels with which our fortunate generation is so abundantly
supplied may be divided broadly into two classes, overlapping and
interlaced with each other, yet on the whole distinguishable as
separate species--the Novel of Adventure and the Novel of Manners. The
former class has a very long pedigree. The early romance writer drew
his incidents from the field of heroic action and marvellous
enterprise; he revelled in noble sentiments, astonishing feats, and
the exhibition of all the cardinal virtues in tragic situations; his
mission was to preserve and hand down to us magnified figures of
mighty men, or the pictures of great events, as they had impressed
themselves upon the popular imagination. For such material he was
obliged to travel abroad into remote countries, or backward to bygone
ages; but if his images of gallant knights and fair damsels were well
modelled, if the language was superb, and the deeds or sufferings
sufficiently astonishing, no one cared about anachronisms,
incongruities, or improbabilities.
But as the heroic romance dwindled and withered under the dry light of
precise knowledge and extending erudition, the purveyors of fiction,
accommodating themselves to a more exacting taste, applied themselves
seriously to the reproduction of famous scenes and portraits by the
aid and guidance of historic documents and antiquarian research. The
modern romantic school, of whom the master, if not the founder, is
Scott, represented a clear step forward to what is now called Realism,
and a proportionate abandonment of the classic convention, or the
method of drawing from traditional or imaginary models. To Scott may
be ascribed the authoritative introduction of descriptions of
landscape, of storms, sunsets, and picturesque effects; not the
artificial scene-painting of Mrs. Radcliffe, but artistic delineations
of the aspects of earth, sea, and sky which gave depth and atmosphere
to his dramatic situations. From this period, also, may be dated the
practice, so entirely contrary to the spirit of true romance, of
verifying by documentary evidence the details of a story. It was Scott
who, in the first years of this century, set prominently the example
of appending copious notes to his stories in verse or prose, wherein
he displayed his archaeologic lore and produced his authorities for any
striking illustration of manners or characteristic incident. This
practice, which was largely adopted by others, was at least an
improvement upon the old unregenerate system of seasoning the
conversation of warriors and peasants with uncouth phrases picked up
at random, or trusting to mere fancy or accepted formula for the
description of battles or of the ways of folk in mediaeval castles and
cottages. But the process savoured too much of the workshop. A novel
or poem that required an appendix of notes and glossaries must be of
high excellence to avoid suspicious resemblance to an elaborate
literary counterfeit, since open and avowed borrowing from
dictionaries of antiquities or volumes of travel must damage the
illusion which is the indispensable element of romance. In Moore's
fantastic metrical romance of _Lalla Rookh_ the system was carried to
an extent that now seems ridiculous, for certain passages are loaded
with outlandish phrases or metaphors that are unintelligible except by
reference to the notes. Nevertheless the English public, being then
quite ignorant of the true East, tolerated Moore's sham Orientalism,
even though Byron's fine poems were just then exposing the difference
between working up the subject in a library and wandering in Asiatic
countries. Byron's language seems in the present day turgid, and his
Greeks and Turks may have a theatrical air, but his splendid
descriptive passages were drawn by a master hand straight from nature,
while his colouring, landscape, and costume are usually excellent; so
that his work also is a distinct movement in the direction of realism.
Yet it is to be observed that after Byron and Scott the metrical
romance, that most ancient form of tale-telling, fell rapidly into
disuse. The fact that Byron's latest poem, _Don Juan_, belonged
essentially to the coming realistic school, is a significant
indication of transition; and Scott's abandonment of poetry for prose,
which was a necessary consequence of his advance toward realism, gave
its death-blow to the earlier fashion.
By this time, indeed, the conventional writer of adventures, though he
held his ground up to or even beyond the middle of the century, was in
a state of incurable decadence. He was losing the confidence of the
general reader, who had picked up some precise notions regarding
appropriate scenery, language, and costume in sundry periods and
divers places, from China to Peru; and he was persecuted by that
mortal foe of the old romancer, the well-informed critic, who trampled
even upon a commonplace book well filled with references to standard
authorities, insisting upon careful study of the whole environment,
the dexterous incorporation of details, and delicate blending of local
colours. Severe pedagogic handling of a historic novel, as if it were
a paper done at some competitive examination, was too much for the old
school, which finally subsided into cheap popular editions, making way
for a new class of writers that adapted the Novel of Adventure to the
requirements of latter-day taste, to the widening of knowledge, and
the diversified expansion of our national life. The prevailing
tendency was now to confine the range of scene and action more and
more approximately to the contemporary period, to insist on genuine
materials, and to observe a stricter canon of probabilities, wherein
the discriminating reader fancied himself to be a judge. The use of
notes was discarded as contrary to the high artistic principle that in
fiction everything must resemble reality while nothing must be
demonstrably matter of fact. The appearance of famous personages must
be occasional, after the manner of gods in an epic poem; they must not
be, as formerly, the leading characters and chief actors in the drama.
And great battles, instead of marking the grand climacteric of a
story's development, were now merely traversed, so to speak, on their
outskirts, or were only approached near enough to throw a glowing
sidelight on certain groups and situations. The gradual adoption of
these limitations may be traced back to the naval and military novels
that reflect the traditions of the great French war. No one even then
thought of writing a romance with Nelson or Bonaparte as the hero, or
of finishing off in the full blaze of Trafalgar or in the rout of
Waterloo; although with Marryat and Lever the English reader revelled
in the dashing exploits or bacchanalian revels of sailors and
soldiers. Lever did indeed give glimpses of Wellington or Napoleon;
but his business was with Connaught Rangers and French guardsmen;
while Marryat and Michael Scott gave us daring sea-captains and
reckless sailors with inimitable vigour and animation.
But as the echo of thunderous battles by sea and land died away, this
particular offshoot of modern romance ceased to flourish, and has
never had any considerable revival. The tale-teller of adventure, like
his ancestor the epic poet, requires a certain haziness of atmosphere;
he must have elbow room for his inventive faculty; and he is liable to
be stifled in the flood of lucid narrative and inflexible facts let
loose upon recent events in our day by complete histories, personal
memoirs, public documents, war correspondence, and all-pervading
journalism. This is probably the main reason why the Crimean War and
the Indian Mutiny, which broke for brief intervals the long peace of
England, have furnished no fresh material contribution of importance
to the romance of war, either in prose or poetry, to stamp the memory
of a long weary siege, or of a short and bloody struggle, upon the
popular imagination. Another reason must be, of course, the
non-appearance in England of the _vates sacer_; for Tolstoi has shown
us that within and without Sebastopol there might be found material
for work of the highest order. However this may be, it is a remarkable
fact that just about that time the novel of adventure turned back for
a moment, in Kingsley's hands, to the spacious times of great
Elizabeth, to the Armada and the legends of filibustering on the
Spanish main; and at the present time we may observe that the leading
writer of this school goes back at least a hundred years for the field
of his best stories. The eighteenth century, whose politics,
philosophy, and literature seemed to Carlyle's somewhat bookish
conception to be flat, prosaic, and comparatively uninteresting, was
in truth for Englishmen pre-eminently the age of energetic activity,
which touched the high level of romantic enterprise at two points, the
Scottish rebellions and the exploits of famous buccaneers. Mr.
Stevenson has reopened, with great skill and success, these mines of
literary ore that had been discovered but only partially worked by
Walter Scott. His rare artistic instinct divined the rich veins which
they still contained; while in other stories his intimate acquaintance
with actual life and circumstance on the coasts and islands of the
Pacific Ocean has provided him with those elements of distance and
unfamiliarity which are essential, as we have suggested, to the
composition of the novel of adventure. Other less original writers
have travelled in search of these elements to the Australian bush or
the outlying half-explored regions of South Africa.
This very cursory survey of the main influences and circumstances that
have shaped the course and set the fashion of our modern novel of
adventure may be useful in explaining its actual position at the
present moment. Scepticism and research have effectually retrenched
the very liberal credit formerly assigned to romance writing; the art
now consists in spinning a long narrative out of authentic materials
which must be disguised or kept hidden; while its leading features are
a delight in elaborate accessories and that very modern sentiment, a
horror of anachronism. A few living artists, like Mr. Shorthouse and
Mr. Stevenson, can still excel under these difficult conditions,
which have driven a crowd of second-rate novelists into the extreme of
minute realism. Into this retreat, however, they have been followed by
a host of readers; for in these days of universal instruction and flat
uneventful existence nothing satisfies the average mind like
photographic detail, which is a commodity to be had of every
industrious or studious composer. As the range of accurate information
extends, as the dust heap of old records, private as well as public,
is sifted more narrowly, as the antique habit of taking things readily
for granted disappears, the novel becomes more and more an arrangement
of genuine facts and circumstances, interleaved by such fiction as the
skill and imagination of the author can produce. It may be worth
observing that this demand for exact verification has affected the use
of the early chronicles in two contrary ways; they are relied upon
implicitly or they are arbitrarily discredited, in proportion as the
facts stated appear credible or not credible to critics or professors
who are working upon them. All the particulars of a great battle or of
some famous event that can be gleaned out of some ancient monkish
annalist, who must always have collected his information by hearsay
and often after many years, are treated as authentic so long as they
do not sound improbable; but if they offend against the canon of
probability set up by a library-hunting student, they are liable to be
summarily rejected. We may venture upon the conjecture that the true
result of this process is to assimilate the work of the critical
historian much more nearly than he would for a moment allow to that of
a skilful historic novelist. A romancer of insight and imaginative
power, who studied his period, would be quite as likely to make a
lucky selection of real incidents, motives, and characters, in a story
of the Roman Empire or of England under the Plantagenets, as an
erudite writer of history. Perhaps the best measure available to us of
what we may believe in regard to far-off times is afforded by
observation of what now happens in rough societies or remote places;
and this test the novelist is rather more apt, on the whole, to employ
than the historian.
In the novels, as upon the stage, this demand for minute accuracy of
scenic or historical details has necessarily elicited an abundant
supply; though whether the entire picture is rendered much more
natural and real by an accumulation of correct particulars may be
questioned. 'La recherche exageree du vrai peut conduire au faux.' It
is most doubtful whether laborious research can reconstruct a
life-like presentation of a vanished society, its modes of life, its
ways of thinking and acting. In vain the novelist or the painter
studies archaeology, takes a journey to the Holy Land for his local
colouring, reads up the records of the time, or works in museums. The
result may be ingenious and even instructive; but there are sure to be
great errors and anachronisms, although they may now be
undiscoverable; while the general tone, point of view, and balance of
motives are nearly certain to be obscured or distorted. For the modern
novelist, like the ancient myth-maker, is necessarily the child of his
time; his work takes the bent of his personal temperament, and is
moulded by the environment of ideas and circumstances within which he
lives. The Myth, the Romance, the Historic Novel, each in its
successive period, did at least this service to later generations:
they preserved and handed down to us the popular impressions, the
figures or pictures of great men and striking events, as they were
reflected upon the imagination of subsequent ages. It can never be
discovered, and it does not very much matter, whether these images
have any close resemblance to the lost originals; it may be that some
artists in some periods saw far more clearly than in others. The true
criterion for estimating the true value of romantic fiction, of tales
of action and adventure, must be always its artistic and intellectual
qualities, the question whether it succeeds in filling a broad canvas,
in dealing with masculine sentiment and stirring action, in striking
the deeper chords of human emotion and energy.
But the historic novel of our day strives principally after exact
reproduction, as may be seen even in a book of such incontestable
talent as _Marius the Epicurean_, and very notably in Archdeacon
Farrar's book, _Darkness and Dawn, or Scenes in the Days of Nero_
(1891), which may stand as the type and complete specimen of Erudite
Fiction. In his preface he tells us that
'those who are familiar with the literature of the first century
will recognise that even for the minutest allusions and particulars
I have contemporary authority. Expressions and incidents which to
some might seem startlingly modern, are in reality suggested by
passages in the satirists, epigrammatists, and romancers of the
(Roman) Empire, or by anecdotes preserved in the grave pages of
Seneca and the elder Pliny.'
Here we have reached, in this conscientious explanation of method, the
extreme point of remoteness from the original spirit of historic
romance. Archdeacon Farrar's figures and descriptions are worked out
upon the pattern of a mosaic, by piecing together the loose
fragmentary bits of our knowledge regarding life and society under
Nero. A glance at these books shows that they belong to the latest
school of nineteenth-century fiction, to a period when careful
scholarly accumulation of accessories and adroit adaptation of history
have taken the place, not only of convention and clumsy invention,
but also of the free untrammelled handling of types and traditions
which gave freshness and originality to the simpler forms of early
romance.
We believe, then, that these attempts at exact reproduction, this
method of the multiplication of particulars, involve a fallacy, and
are detrimental to the more enduring forms of art. But the people is
willing to be deceived; the general reader has acquired a taste that
must be gratified; with the result that the elder romancers in prose
and verse, including Scott and Byron, are falling out of fashion with
the middle classes, though Scott holds his own in the sixpenny
edition. The rule of Realism is becoming so despotic that the story of
adventure is reverting more and more to that shape which lends itself
most completely to life-like narrative, the shape of a Memoir. And it
may be pointed out accordingly that in France the Editor of Memoirs
has lately entered into substantial rivalry with the Novelist of
Adventure.
It must have been noticed by those who attend to the course of French
literature, that of late years the publication of Memoirs relating to
the period of the Revolutionary war, and especially of the First
Empire, has rather suddenly increased. The causes are undoubtedly to a
considerable degree political, connected with the reorganisation of
the French army and navy, which has revived the military ardour of the
nation, and has given an edge to the deep-seated spirit of rivalry
with Germany on land and with England at sea. Whatever immediately
interests a nation gives a sharp turn to its literature, and the
immense success of General Marbot's book, containing the extraordinary
personal experiences of one who passed through the most famous scenes
of the heroic era, exactly hit off the public taste at a moment when
various motives combined to revive the Napoleonic legend. The
historians of that era had done their harvesting; the crop had been
reaped, raked, and gleaned; the time was too near and too thoroughly
known for fiction; and yet there never was a finer field for the
production of romance. No one can doubt that if Napoleon Bonaparte had
conquered half Europe, won his tremendous battles, and founded his
empire in an illiterate prehistoric age, he would have taken
everlasting rank with Alexander the Great and Charlemagne as the
central figure of a third world-wide cycle of heroic myths; nor is it
necessary to read Archbishop Whately's _Historic Doubts_ to perceive
how readily Napoleon's real story lends itself to extravagant
myth-making. At a later period he might have been the leading
character in some prolix and pedantic romance, and still more recently
his life and deeds would have been built up into the scaffolding
within which the historic novelist used to construct his love idylls,
his tragic situations, or even his illustrations of some social
theory. All these methods and devices have become obsolete; and though
the spirit of hero-worship that animated those who listened to the
ancient tales still possesses mankind at certain seasons, Romance must
now submit to the hard conditions of modern Realism. In this
predicament it finds a new and satisfactory embodiment in the form of
Memoirs concerning the great Emperor and his companions, which
dispense copious anecdotes of his court and camp, his sayings and
doings, his domestic habits, his private manners and peccadilloes. If
these particulars can be served up as sauce to the description of
mighty events, the contrast renders them all the more savoury. But
there is now a large class of readers who care less about Jena and
Austerlitz than for such books as _Napoleon Intime, Napoleon et les
Femmes_, which have all the attraction always possessed by the
intermixture of love and war, and by the blending of arms with amours
in the conventional style of historic fiction. The lowest depth is
reached when the reminiscences of an Emperor's valet, to whom he is
still a kind of hero, are served up with that succulent dressing of
vivid particularity which is swallowed with relish because it brings
down a great man to the level of the most trivial experience.
How far these Memoirs are genuine in the sense which makes them so
attractive--that is to say, as literally authentic pictures of a great
man's interior life, of his actual words and behaviour as witnessed by
his intimates--must always remain doubtful to the sceptical mind. True
reminiscences are naturally somewhat cloudy in outline, hanging loose
together with gaps and interruptions; whereas these are all coherent,
clear-cut, and written in a style that gives superior polish and
setting to every scene and anecdote. That they are compiled upon a
solid substratum of truth need not be questioned; nevertheless some of
them seem to differ only in degree from the realistic novel of the
very latest type, such as Zola's _Debacle_, which contains a very
strong and pervading mixture of pure historical fact.
But whatever may be the exact proportion of authenticity which this
class of Memoirs can justly claim, they completely fulfil the prime
conditions of popularity prescribed for the modern novel, which must
work out minute details with the greatest possible resemblance to
actual life and circumstance. Upon this ground, indeed, the ablest
professors of fiction might despair of competing with those who
exhibit a mighty man of valour in undress, who lead us where we may
hear him talk, watch him eat or shave, and study his conjugal
relations. It is to be feared that if the multiplication of such
Reminiscences continues, they will seriously trench upon the province
of the novelist, who will be left no scope for the employment of his
craft in a field that has been thoroughly ransacked, and who must
inevitably retire before writers who have discovered the art of making
truth quite as amusing as fiction, than which it must always be more
interesting. The brilliant success of Marbot's Memoirs, which were
undoubtedly written by himself, seems to have warmed into activity and
circulation various other volumes of similar reminiscences that must
have been hibernating for one or two generations in the family
archives, or have otherwise fallen into temporary oblivion; for in
many cases one is inclined to wonder why authentic documents of such
value and interest were not sooner produced.
The latest example of this class of Memoirs, belonging to the
Revolutionary or Napoleonic cycle, is to be found in the _Adventures_
of A. Moreau de Jonnes, who died in 1870 at the age of ninety-two,
having been for fifty years a member of the Institut and a great
authority on statistics. 'We should never have supposed,' says M. Leon
Say in his preface to this book, 'that Moreau had been the hero of
warlike adventures, or that he might possibly have been placed in a
line with Marbot.' The men of M. Say's generation who knew Marbot were
quite unaware, he adds, that here was a naval and colonial Marbot,
whose fighting life was one of the strangest of stories. M. Say's
preface seems to be intended as a guarantee of this story's
authenticity, though he notices casually the remarkable fact that 'on
every occasion when Moreau is on the brink of destruction, it is his
luck to be saved by a pretty girl'; also that 'a charming
portrait-gallery might be made of the women who, between 1793 and
1805, rescued this hardy rover, who was both sailor and soldier, from
death by sword or sickness in divers parts of the world,' from the
West India Islands to the banks of the Thames. His guarantee must be
accepted; yet if this book had not been the genuine autobiography of a
known personage, there would really be nothing to distinguish it from
the historic novel, in which an imaginary person, such as Thackeray's
Esmond, describes well-known scenes of history as an eye-witness and
actor in them. Moreau was present at the great naval engagement of
June 1, 1794; at the hanging of Parker, the ringleader of the famous
mutiny at the Nore, when he was saved by Parker's widow; he was in
Bantry Bay with the ships of Hoche's unlucky expedition; he landed
with Humbert in Donegal, and saw the Race of Castlebar; he had some
marvellous experiences in the West Indies, and everywhere the devotion
of women facilitated his hairbreadth escapes. There need be no irony
in repeating that avowed fiction can have no chance at all in
competition with literature of this class.
'Times are changed,' observes M. Leon Say in his preface. 'The taste
of the public of our own day grows more and more keen for the romance
of the cloak and rapier, when the heroes relate their own adventures.
The authentic Memoirs of the d'Artagnans of our own century are now
preferred even to the works of Alexandre Dumas, so dear to our youth.'
Undoubtedly they must be preferred, for being more real than the most
realistic novel, and just as full of fascinating adventures, the
Memoir is superior precisely at those points which have given the
modern romance an advantage over its more conventional predecessors.
There may be consolation for the novelist in the reflection that the
fund from which these Memoirs are drawn must soon be running low,
whereas the resources of fiction are comparatively inexhaustible. In
the meantime one result, already perceptible, will be that the novel
will tend more and more to imitate the personal memoir, by reverting
to the autobiographical form which, since Defoe's day, has always been
fiction's most effective disguise, permitting the author to efface
himself completely, while it gives the whole composition an air of
dramatic vigour. It will have been observed that the most vivid
modern English romances, from _Barry Lyndon_ and _Esmond_ to
_John Inglesant_, _Kidnapped_, and _The Master of Ballantrae_,
are all written as the direct narratives of men who have taken a
comparatively secondary or even humble share in great transactions. On
the other hand, the famous characters who stand in the foremost line of
history, and who were the delight and ornament of the elder romances,
must now be struck out of the repertory of the modern story-teller,
since the public now will no longer tolerate ancient or mediaeval heroes,
while the great men of recent times have been too often photographed.
The only novelist of our own day who has attempted with some success to
draw thinly-veiled portraits of contemporary celebrities is Disraeli,
and his whole style and treatment show him to be a true-bred
descendant of the old romantic stock.
Our argument is, therefore, that various causes and tendencies, the
change of environment, the limitation of the average reader's
experiences, his taste for accuracy, his rejection of tradition,
convention, anachronism and improbabilities, the extension of exact
knowledge and the critical spirit, have all combined to limit the
sphere of the Novel of Adventure and to check the free sweep of its
inventive genius. To these conditions the first-class artist can
accommodate himself; but for the average writer they serve fatally to
expedite his descent into the regions of everyday life, among all the
emotions known to middle-class folk, from murders, bankruptcies, and
railway accidents down to their religious doubts and the psychology of
their love-making.
* * * * *
Against all these adverse circumstances the Novel of Adventure strives
gallantly, and, of late years, with such conspicuous success, that it
is difficult to decide whether the tide of popular inclination has not
turned against the Novel of Manners. This branch of the great
story-telling family has, as we know, a long descent and an
illustrious pedigree, although for our present purpose we need not go
back further than the eighteenth century, to _Gil Blas_ in France and
_Tom Jones_ in England. It will be found that these masterpieces
consist principally of a series of scenes and comical or semi-tragical
situations, rather loosely strung together on the thread of the
experiences undergone by the principal personages. The main object is
not so much ingenuity of plot as the presentation with much humour,
some strokes of caricature, and a touch of pathos, of morals and
manners, of public abuses and private vices, the way of living and
standard of thinking, the distinctive prejudices and ingrained
beliefs, that characterised different classes at a time when their
ideas and habits were often in sharp contrast. The sketches are
admirably done, the conversation is full of wit, the whole work may be
relied upon as a faithful though coarsely drawn picture of
contemporary society. Fielding constantly makes a halt in his
narrative to moralise and discourse ironically with the reader, in a
vein that was reopened a century later by Thackeray, and by him pretty
nearly exhausted, for at any rate it has since been closed.
Mr. Raleigh's book contains a just and discriminating appreciation of
Fielding's place in the line of great novelists, and of the strong
formative influence that his work exercised over the early development
of what is now called Naturalism. This note is struck, as he points
out, in the invocation at the beginning of the thirteenth book of _Tom
Jones_, addressed to Experience, to the inspiration which is derived
from what one has actually seen and known among all sorts and
conditions of men:
'Others before him had seen and known these things, but in
Fielding's pages they are for the first time introduced, with no
loss of reality, to subserve the ends of fiction; common life is
the material of the story, but it is handled here for the first
time with the freedom and imagination of a great artist.'[4]
And here, we may add, is the fruitful and vigorous stock out of which
has since radiated that immense growth of realistic novels which now
tends to overshadow and supersede the earlier species of romance
literature.
But Fielding's style is unblushingly masculine; his scenes are in the
street, the tavern, the sponging-house, and other places
unmentionable. By the end of his century the Novel of Manners had
fallen into very different hands, and to these it owes mainly the
shaping, both as to tone and subject, that decisively laid down its
course of future development. The electricity of that stormful period
which comprises the last years of the eighteenth and the opening of
the nineteenth century seems to have generated an efflorescence of
high original capacity in the department of imagination as well as of
action. Nevertheless nothing is more remarkable, probably nothing was
less expected, than the sudden accession of women to the first rank
of popular novelists. Miss Burney, Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen (not to
mention Miss Ferrier), entered upon the same field from different
points and divided it among them. They may be said to have virtually
created the decent story of contemporary life, the light satirical
pictures of familiar folk, the representation of ordinary society in
the form of a delicate comedy, which rose to the pitch of racy humour
when the scenes and characters were Irish. Under the touch of this
feminine genius convention vanishes altogether; the painting is direct
from nature; the plot and incidents are saturated with probability;
the personages might be met at the corner of any street in town or
village; the very voice, gesture, and language are almost ludicrously
familiar. No heroics, not much use of the pathetic; very slight
landscape-painting and background; no psychology; there is no
systematic attempt to introduce, under the story's disguise, the
serious discussion of social, political, or polemical questions.
For an artist who deals so largely with country life, the absence of
landscape-painting in Miss Austen is very noticeable. The fine vein of
satire that pervades all her work, the constant presence of the human
element, leave her no room for expatiating on the aspects of nature;
and indeed she was manifestly impatient with enthusiasts over the
picturesque. She only touched upon such tastes in order to bring out
character:
'"It is very true," said Marianne, "that admiration of landscape
scenery is become a mere jargon. Everybody pretends to feel and
tries to describe with the taste and elegance of him who first
defined what picturesque beauty was. I detest jargon of every kind;
and sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could
find no language to describe them in but what was worn and
hackneyed out of all sense and meaning."
'"I am convinced," said Edward, "that you really feel all the
delight in a fair prospect which you profess to feel. But, in
return, your sister must allow me to feel no more than I profess. I
like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles; I do not
like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if
they are tall, straight, and flourishing. I do not like ruined,
tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles or thistles or heath
blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than a
watch-tower, and a troop of tidy happy villagers please me better
than the finest banditti in the world."'[5]
There can be no doubt, indeed, that in the novels of this period two
main features of the modern story, the word-painting of scenery and
the analysis of subjective emotions, are conspicuously absent. Yet
among the manifold causes to which may be ascribed the wide recent
expansion of the Novel of Manners, we may well reckon the decisive
impulse that it received from these famous authoresses. They were, in
fact, the founders of the dominion which women bid fair to establish
over this class of fiction, where they are already extending it to a
degree that threatens to evict the men. Various circumstances have
co-operated toward this curious literary revolution. The conventional
romance, though apparently flourishing, was in their time on the brink
of a decline; and as women have never succeeded in the Novel of
Adventure--for the obvious reason that their tastes and experiences
are opposed to success--they had no difficulty in abandoning a
decaying school, and in throwing all their freshness of mind and
subtlety of observation into the department which precisely suited
their idiosyncrasy. The spread of education among female readers and
writers has undoubtedly aided them. And thus the rise of feminine
novelists has operated as a formidable contingent of fresh troops that
has joined the camp of Manners, to which alliance it may be noticed
that, with very few exceptions, the women have faithfully adhered. For
although in the last century Mrs. Radcliffe had revived, as Mr.
Raleigh observes, the Romance proper, and Miss Jane Porter claimed in
the first years of this century the honour of having invented the
historical romance, women have been practically superseded in this
class of literature, so far as it survives, by men, George Eliot's
_Romola_ being the only notable exception. The true representatives of
female novelists are now the leaders of that school which confines
itself to minute observation, whether of outward facts or inward
feeling, and which is above all things devoted to the close
delineation of contemporary society. The analysis of character within
the range of ordinary experience, the play of civilised emotion, the
vicissitudes of grief or joy in the parsonage, the ball-room, and the
village, the troubled course of legitimate love-making, have all
contributed the congenial material whereby the Novel of Manners
treated realistically, as the phrase goes, has been moulded by the
adroit hands of women.
We do not forget that the most remarkable Mannerists that have
appeared in this century were male authors--Thackeray and Dickens. But
we are not now attempting to survey the whole field of modern English
fiction, or to assign to every star its place in that wide firmament.
Our aim is only to indicate the main lines of filiation that have
produced the prevailing novel of the day. The permanent influence of
the two great artists who have been mentioned has not been, we think,
proportionate to the rare and original value of their work. Both of
them had many imitators in their lifetime and for a little time
afterward; but before they died they were both showing symptoms of
loss of power; and one could see that the special fibre or faculty
that distinguished them was becoming overstrained; it was betraying
effort and exaggeration. In their latest productions their peculiar
qualities became mannerisms, of which readers soon began to be weary;
and this may partly account for the speedy subsequent diversion of the
popular taste into other channels. At any rate they did not found an
enduring school, like Jane Austen, of whom it may be said that a great
proportion of those novels of ordinary society which fill annually the
lists of circulating libraries may be referred to her work as their
type and forerunner. The novels of Anthony Trollope, for example,
follow very much the same range of subject, the same level of emotion
and incident; they consist mainly of satirical yet good-humoured
descriptions of middle-class life in the country, the suburbs, and
occasionally in the higher walks of society--they are always decorous
and never dull, but they never rise to the note of romance or
adventure. It may even be added, in further proof of Trollope's
literary ancestry, that the predominant quality of these very clever
but eminently commonplace stories, with their interminable flirtations
and their amusing dialogues which might have been reported by
phonograph, is essentially feminine.
Our view is, therefore, that three famous women authors accomplished
for the Novel of Manners very much what Scott at the same period did
for the Novel of Adventure; they stamped its lasting form and shaped
its subsequent development. And in both classes, in tales of adventure
as of society, we may detect clearly the rising spirit of what has
been since called Realism or Naturalism, the discarding of
convention, the abandonment of mere attitudes for action studied from
the life, the direct appropriation of material from surrounding facts
and perceptible feelings, from the familiar humours and concerns of
everyday existence. In _Le Roman Naturaliste_, by M. Brunetiere, one
chapter is allotted to English Naturalism, and the author declares
that the standard of Naturalism was raised in 1859 by the author of
_Adam Bede_, quoting certain passages in which George Eliot, he says,
has distinctly preached the fundamental doctrines of that school.
Undoubtedly George Eliot declared her purpose to be the rendering of a
faithful account of men and things as they mirrored themselves in her
mind. 'I feel as much bound,' she says, 'to tell you as precisely as I
can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating
my evidence on oath'; and she set up as her ideal 'this rare precious
quality of truthfulness, for which I delight in many Dutch paintings.'
But the cardinal virtue of this fine and sombre genius lay in her
power of raising Realism to a high artistic level, of diffusing a
poetic light over humble scenes, of touching the deeper and vital
relations of common things. In Charlotte Bronte, again, we have
Naturalism throwing out a fresh shoot of great vigour and originality;
the old-fashioned masculine hero is supplanted by a heroine who
strives against adverse circumstance upon an ordinary, often an
humble, plane of society, never travelling for a moment beyond the
possibilities of everyday existence. This ominous dismissal of the
male hero from his previous position in the centre of the story's
movement may be taken as a sign that he is not of so much account in
the sphere of domestic fiction as he was erst in the arena of perilous
adventure. It is true that mankind is still glorified by Ouida, a
lady who may yet be occasionally found sitting, almost alone, by the
shores of old Romance; but with Mrs. Gaskell, Mrs. Oliphant, Miss
Broughton, and even Miss Braddon, the majority of their leading
characters may be said to be female. And the most deservedly popular
of our latest novels by women is _Marcella_.
We must not be understood to maintain that the Novel of Manners has
been, or is being, completely monopolised, as a department of light
literature, by women, for of course there are many men who are
achieving success in that field, among whom Henry James holds a high
place for distinction and delicacy of workmanship. And among certain
special branches in which women have not as yet competed at all, we
may mention the Sporting Novel, where provincial manners and the
humour of the coverside have been portrayed by Surtees with wonderful
exactitude and a kind of coarse yet irresistible comicality that
remind one of Fielding. It is true that he never moralises, as
Fielding does; but then the interjection by the author of moral
reflections went out, as we have said, with Thackeray. The description
of landscape drawn from nature occupies large and extending space in
the latter-day novel of manners, where it is used very sparingly as
subservient to character or situation, but commonly as an illustration
or pictorial background. Let us compare the two following extracts.
The first is from Jane Austen's _Mansfield Park_:
'Now we shall have no more rough road, Miss Crawford; our
difficulties are over. The rest of the way is such as it ought to
be. Mr. Rushworth has made it since he succeeded to the
estate.--Here begins the village. Those cottages are really a
disgrace. The church spire is reckoned remarkably handsome. I am
glad the church is not so close to the great House as often happens
in old places. The annoyance of the bells must be terrible. There
is the parsonage, a tidy-looking house, and I understand the
clergyman and his wife are very decent people. Those are
almshouses, built by some of the family. To the right is the
steward's house; he is a very respectable man. Now we are coming to
the lodge gates; but we have nearly a mile through the park still.
It is not ugly, you see, at this end; there is some fine timber,
but the situation of the house is dreadful. We go down hill to it
for half a mile, and it is a pity, for it would not be an
ill-looking place if it had a better approach.'
The second is from the opening pages of Mrs. Humphry Ward's
_Marcella_:
'She looked out upon a broad and level lawn, smoothed by the care
of centuries, flanked on either side by groups of old trees--some
Scotch firs, some beeches, a cedar or two--groups where the slow
selective hand of Time had been at work for generations, developing
here the delightful roundness of quiet mass and shade, and there
the bold caprice of bare fir trunks and ragged branches, standing
back against the sky. Beyond the lawn stretched a green descent
indefinitely long, carrying the eye indeed almost to the limit of
the view, and becoming from the lawn onwards a wide irregular
avenue, bordered by beeches of a splendid maturity, ending at last
in a far distant gap where a gate--and a gate of some
importance--clearly should have been, yet was not. The size of the
trees, the wide uplands of the falling valley to the left of the
avenue, now rich in the tints of harvest, the autumn sun pouring
steadily through the vanishing mists, the green breadth of the vast
lawn, the unbroken peace of wood and cultivated ground, all carried
with them a confused general impression of well-being and of
dignity. Marcella drew it in--this impression--with avidity. Yet at
the same moment she noticed involuntarily the gateless gap at the
end of the avenue, the choked condition of the garden paths on
either side of the lawn, and the unsightly tufts of grass spotting
the broad gravel terrace beneath her window.'
In the former passage, which is brimful of humorous suggestion, the
writer is exclusively intent upon setting out points of human
character in an effective light. The latter is a highly-finished piece
of word-painting, taken direct, as an artist would take a picture,
from a landscape that lay before the writer, and as such it is
excellently done; but, except for the slight indication of a neglected
estate, it stands apart from the plot or the play of character, and
might be bound up with the volume or omitted like a woodcut.
Undoubtedly the art of descriptive writing, which demands poetic
feeling and a delicate hand upon the organ of language, is practised
finely by the best of our modern novelists, and is a valuable element
of their popularity. Yet there are signs that it is already threatened
by the inexorable demands of the lower realism, which takes slight
account of the intimations that can be conveyed or the emotions that
may be roused by using language as an instrument for the
interpretation of nature, and requires to be shown the thing itself,
as it is seen in a photograph. 'The tendency of the times,' we are
told, 'seems to be to read less and less, and to depend more upon
pictorial records of events.' And the author from whom we quote[6]
proceeds to show how a few lines of sketch at once elucidate and
vivify whole pages of word-painting. He goes further, and relates how
'the fallacy of the accepted system of describing landscapes,
buildings, and the like in words,' was proved experimentally by
reading slowly a description of a castle, mountains, and a river
winding to the sea, from one of the Waverley novels, before a number
of students, three of whom proceeded to indicate on a black board the
leading lines of the mental picture produced by the words. The
drawings were all different and all wrong, as might indeed have been
confidently foretold; for the two sister arts of the pen and of the
pencil cannot possibly interpret each other reciprocally after this
fashion, or produce identical effects by their widely differing
methods.
Yet it is not impossible that the lower ranks of writers, who
exaggerate the prevailing fashion of exactly reproducing what any one
can see and hear, may find themselves outbid and overpowered on this
ground by illustration in line and colour. In this direction, indeed,
lies the danger of extreme Realism. It wages war against Romance,
which subsists upon idealistic conceptions of noble thought and
action; it pretends to hold up a true mirror to society, because it
reflects faithfully and without discrimination, like a photograph, the
street, the club, or the drawing-room, and arranges dramatically the
commonplace talk of everyday people. All this is fatal to high art, in
writing as in painting; nor can very clever dialogue, ingenious
situations, variety of style and subject, or even a high average
morality, preserve such literature from triviality and gradual
degradation.
* * * * *
It is the saying of a French writer, that the novel of to-day has
abjured both the past and the future, and lives wholly in the present.
We are so far of his opinion in regard to the past, that we doubt, for
reasons already given, whether the reading public can be induced to
travel backward into distant periods and unfamiliar scenes, even
though facts, anecdotes, costume, and other accessories be
scrupulously and historically exact. The future is a domain upon which
the novelist has rarely trespassed; but in close propinquity to it
lies theologic speculation, and we have not long ago witnessed the
fascination that can be exercised over a multitude of readers by a
novel which described the unhappiness brought upon the peaceful home
of an Anglican clergyman who was driven forth from his parsonage by
imbibing some tincture of modern Biblical criticism. The sensation,
for so it must be called, produced by _Robert Elsmere_, illustrated
the degree to which in these days popularity depends on hitting the
intellectual level of the general reader, and on touching the fancy or
the conscience of that very numerous class whose culture is of the
medium sort, neither high nor low. For while it seems certain that to
a great many people the views and arguments which overthrew Elsmere's
orthodoxy and brought him to martyrdom must have seemed profound,
daring, and novel, to others they are but too familiar and by no means
fresh. To some of us, indeed, the overpowering effect produced on
Elsmere's mind by his remarkable discoveries may be not unlike the awe
and gratitude with which an African chief receives the present of an
obsolete cannon. But the main reason why the future is no better field
than the distant past for the modern novelist, is that in both cases
there is a want of actuality, and that the positive temper of the age
requires in either case something more definite and verifiable.
It may be affirmed, moreover, as a general observation, that the
spirit of realism is hostile to the Novel with a Purpose, whether it
be that species which undertakes to argue or instruct under the cloak
of agreeable fiction, or that other species, much cultivated by
Dickens in his later works, which attacks antiquated institutions and
public abuses in a story so contrived as to expose their absurdity and
injustice. There is an air of artificiality about such compositions
which damages the artistic illusion, the photographic rendering of
actual life, upon which the author relies, because it throws over the
stage a shadow of his own personality. For one tendency of excessive
realism is to encourage an approximation between literary and
theatrical effects, since the whole interest becomes concentrated upon
figures acting and moving under a strong light in the foreground of
scenes carefully adjusted, so that anything which betrays the author's
presence interrupts the performance.
Yet although our contemporary novelist is thus subjected, in respect
of his period and his repertory, to limitations from which his
predecessors were free, there has never been a time when English
fiction has exhibited, in competent hands, greater fertility of
invention and resource, or so high an average proficiency in the art
of writing. The vastly increased demand for amusement in modern life
has stimulated the production of light literature, which is now
cultivated far more widely than heretofore, like tea, and the market
is flooded with an article of sound moderate quality. At this moment
we have in very truth a democracy of letters, for while no mighty
masters overtop the rest, the number of writers who stand on an
equality of merit, who can produce one or more excellent stories, is
very large. Their field has widened with the expansion of British
enterprise; they can draw their plots, descriptions, and characters
from the colonies, from Africa, from the South Sea Islands, or from
India; and it will be observed that not only the tale of adventure,
but also the quiet story of domestic interiors and family troubles, is
easily acclimatised, and gains something from a sparing use of variety
of dialect and landscape. As for the Novel of Adventure, it is drawing
copious sustenance from these outlying regions. For although it is
only from first favourites that the home-keeping reader will tolerate
an elaborate romance about Africa or the Pacific, he has taken a very
strong liking to short stories of scenes and actions strictly
contemporaneous, written in a rough, vigorous, and utterly
unconventional style, which convey to his mind impressions as
distinctly as a set of pictorial sketches.
We believe that this style, which retains a strong flavour of its
American origin (it can hardly be dated earlier than Bret Harte), may
be reckoned to be peculiar to the light literature of the English
language. We are not aware that it prevails to any extent in other
countries; for although the short story of love, intrigue, and manners
in general has flourished from mediaeval times, and at this moment is
almost exclusively confined to these subjects in France, the class of
works to which we are now referring differs entirely in subject and
style. In England and America the roving life of the colonies, the
backwoods, the Western States, and the Indian frontiers has created an
unique school of realistic fiction in which Mr. Kipling is at this
moment the chief professor. There is moreover a manifest affinity
between these short prose narratives and the strain of racy strenuous
versification upon the quaint unvarnished notions and hardy exploits
of the bush, the prairie, or the frontier, by which Bret Harte,
Lindsay Gordon, and again Kipling have attained celebrity. As these
poems echo the far-off ring of the ancient ballad, so we may venture
to surmise that the short prose story of adventure, which appeals to
modern taste by its vivid reality, its terseness of style, and its
picturesque outline, represents the latest form reached by Romance in
its long evolution. Such a tale will squeeze into fifty or a hundred
pages what Fenimore Cooper or G. P. R. James would have distended into
three volumes of slow-moving narrative, whereby infinite labour is
saved to the hasty and indolent reader of these railroad days.
Here, in short, we perceive the influence of that very characteristic
school of contemporary art, which we know to have always existed, but
to which men have recently given the exceedingly modern title of
Impressionist,--the school of authors who desire to strike the
imagination vividly and with a few sharp strokes, grouping their
figures in a strong light, rounding off their compact story upon a
small canvas, and rejecting every detail that is not strictly
accessory to the main purpose. Already it is beginning to be said in
France that Zola with his laborious particularism has passed his
climacteric of fashion, and that the swift impressionist is sailing in
on a fair wind of spreading popularity. Now in France, though no
longer in England, the critics still do their duty; they are not
merely, to borrow a phrase from Coleridge, the eunuchs who guard the
temple of the Muses; they are often prolific authors who exercise
great influence upon public opinion, so that their forecast of the
course and tendencies of fiction is worth bearing in mind. We
ourselves are ever a restless, bustling, far-wandering folk, great
lovers of fiction and travel, who not only carry forth the English
language into the uttermost parts of the earth, to be moulded in
strange dialects to queer uses, but also bring back fresh ideas and
incidents, and various aspects of a many-sided world-ranging life. If,
as has been often asserted, literature be the collective expression of
the ideas and aspirations, the tastes, feelings, and habits of the
generation which produces it, we may not be altogether wrong in
treating the short highly finished story, whether of adventure or
manners, as the impress and reflection of modern English society. But
no operation is more delicate than the endeavour to trace the subtle
connection between constant modifications of literary form and the
pressure of its ever-changing moral and material environment.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] The list of these contributions at page 477 of his _Life_ is not
complete.
[2] (1) _The English Novel._ By Walter Raleigh. Being a short Sketch
of its History from the Earliest Times to the Appearance of
'Waverley.' London, 1894. (2) _Aventures de Guerre au temps de la
Republique et du Consulat._ Par A. Moreau de Jonnes. Preface de M.
Leon Say. Paris, Guillaumin et Cie., 1893.--_Quarterly Review_,
October 1894.
[3] Now Sir Walter Raleigh.
[4] Page 179.
[5] _Sense and Sensibility._
[6] _The Art of Illustration_, by Henry Blackburn, 1894.
ENGLISH LETTER-WRITING IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY[7]
The preservation and posthumous publication of private correspondence
has supplied modern society with one of its daintiest literary
luxuries. The art of letter-writing is, of course, no recent
invention; it reached a high level of excellence, like almost every
other branch of refined expression in prose or verse, in the older
world of Rome. Nevertheless, the exceeding rarity of the specimens
that have come down to us from those times is an important element of
their value; while in our own day the letters of eminent persons fill
many book-shelves in every decent library, and their quantity
increases out of all proportion to their quality.
It may be said, generally, of fine letter-writing that it is a
distinctive product of a high civilisation, denoting the existence of
a cultured and leisurely class, implying the conditions of secure
intercourse, confidence, sociability, many common interests, and that
peculiar delight in the stimulating interchange of ideas and feelings
which is one characteristic of modern life. The language of a country
must have thrown off its archaic stiffness, must have acquired
suppleness and variety; the writer's instrument must be a style that
combines familiarity with distinction, correctness of thought with
easy diction. It is from the lack of these conditions that the Asiatic
world has given us no such letters; the material as well as the
intellectual environment has been wanting. For similar reasons the
middle ages of Europe produced us none of the kind with which we are
now dealing; the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries have left us
very few samples of them; and since in this article we propose to
treat only of English letter-writers, we may affirm that the art did
not flourish in England until the eighteenth century, when according
to certain authorities it rose to something like perfection. It is a
notable observation of Hume's that Swift is the first Englishman who
wrote polite prose; and Swift is one of the earliest, as he is still
one of the pleasantest, writers of private correspondence that has
taken a permanent place in our literature.
We can understand without difficulty why the eighteenth century was a
period favourable to the growth of excellent letter-writing. There
were very few newspapers, and those which appeared were low in tone
and ill-informed--political pamphleteers abounded and the essayists on
morals and manners were numerous--but it was chiefly by private hands
that accurate information and ideas were circulated in a small and
highly cultivated society with an exquisite taste in literature, with
a keen interest in public affairs, and a very strong appetite for
philosophic discussion. Side by side with the intellectual conditions
we may take into account the national circumstances of that age. The
post was expensive, with a slow and intermittent circulation, so that
letters, being infrequent, were worth writing carefully and at
length; while correspondents were nevertheless not separated by
distances of time and space sufficient to weaken or extinguish the
desire of interchanging thoughts and news. For it is within the
experience of most of us that the difficulty of keeping up regular
correspondence increases with distance; that friends who meet seldom
write to each other rarely; and that, although letters are most valued
by those who are far from home and long absent, yet it is precisely in
the case of prolonged separation that the chain of friendly
communication is apt gradually to slacken until it becomes entirely
disconnected. So long, indeed, as men depended for news on private
sources, there was always a kind of obligation to write; but the
telegraph and the newspaper have now monopolised the Intelligence
Department. On the whole, it may be concluded that the art of
letter-writing flourishes best within a limited radius of distance,
among persons living neither very near to each other nor yet far
apart, who meet occasionally yet not often, and who are within the
same range of social, political, and intellectual influences. Its best
period is probably before the advent of copious indefatigable
journalism, before men have taken to publishing letters in the morning
papers, and when they have not yet acquired the economical habit of
reserving all their valuable ideas and information for signed articles
in some monthly review.
It was under these conditions that the letters of eminent men in the
eighteenth century and the early part of the nineteenth century were
generally written. In the former century letter-writing was
undoubtedly a recognised form of high literary workmanship, with close
affinities on one side to the diary or private journal, and on another
to the essay. Long, continuous, and intimate correspondence, as in the
case of Swift and Walpole, gravitated toward the journal;
dissertations on literature, politics, and manners were more akin to
the essay; while in the hands of the novelist the journalistic series
of letters took artificial development into a method of story-telling.
On the other side, the tendency of epistles to become essays reached
its climax in the letters of Burke, some of which are only
distinguishable from brilliant pamphlets by the formal address and
subscription.
With the nineteenth century begins an era of amusing and animated
letter-writing. The classic and somewhat elaborate style of the
preceding age falls into disuse; the essayist draws gradually back
into a department of his own; the new school reflects, as is natural,
the general tendency of English literature toward a livelier and more
varied movement, with a wider range of subjects and sympathies. In his
letters, as in his poetry, the precursor of the Naturalistic school
was Cowper, who could be simple without being trivial, was never prosy
and often pathetic, and who possessed the rare art of stamping on his
reader's mind an enduring impression of quiet and somewhat commonplace
society in the English midlands. That poets should usually have been
good letter-writers is probably no more than might have been expected,
for imagination and word-power must tell everywhere; yet the list is
so long as to be worth noticing. Swift, Pope, Gray, and Cowper in the
last century, and in the present century Scott, Byron, Shelley,
Coleridge, and Southey, have all left us distinctive and copious
correspondence. Wordsworth may, perhaps, be classed as a notable
exception; for Wordsworth's letters are dull, being at their best more
like essays or literary dissertations than the free outpouring of
intimate thought. They have none of the charm which comes from the
revelation of private doubt or passionate affection that is
ordinarily stifled by convention; they are, on the contrary, eminently
respectable, deliberate, and carefully expressed. 'It has ever been
the habit of my mind,' he writes, 'to trust that expediency will come
out of fidelity to principles, rather than to seek my principles of
action in calculations of expediency.' This is what the Americans call
'high toned'; but the metal is too heavy for the light calibre of a
letter.
Whether Tennyson had the gift of letter-writing we shall be able to
judge when his biography appears; though we may anticipate that it
will contain some things worthy of a great master in the art of
language. The publication of letters deriving their sole or principal
interest from the general reputation of the writer is indeed quite
legitimate and intelligible. They are often biographical documents of
considerable value, apart from all questions of style and intellectual
quality; they can be handled and arranged to exhibit a man's
character; they may be used as negative proofs of reserve and
reticence, as showing his mental attitude toward various subjects, his
domestic habits and virtues, or merely as annals of where he went and
what he did. They may be carefully selected and revised for occasional
insertion at different stages of a long biography, where the editor
sees fit to let the dead man speak for himself; they may be employed
as an advocate chooses the papers in his brief, for attack or defence.
Or they may be produced without commentary, sifting, or omissions, as
the unvarnished presentation of a man's private life and particular
features which a candid friend commits to the judgment of posterity.
Or, lastly, they may be mere relics, not much more in some instances
than curiosities, valued for much the same reasons that would set a
high price on the autograph or the inkstand of a celebrated man, on
his furniture, his house, or anything that was his. In proportion as
little or nothing is known of such a man's private life, every scrap
of his writing increases in value; and so a letter of Shakespeare or
of Dante would be priceless. But of Shakespeare no letter has come
down to us; and of Dante not even, we believe, his signature; though
we do know something of what Dante did and thought, for his religion
and his politics are manifested in his poems; whereas Shakespeare's
works have the divine attribute of impersonality. Here is one supreme
poet of whom the world would gladly hear anything; but nothing remains
to feed the modern appetite, which is never so well gratified as when
a rare and sublime genius stands revealed as the writer of ordinary
letters upon petty domesticities.
It is evidently impossible to draw a line that shall accurately divide
the interest that men feel in a celebrated person from the interest
that they take in his posthumous correspondence; so as to determine
how far the letters are good in themselves. When the writer is well
known, he and his writings are inseparable. Yet some attempt must be
made, for the purposes of this article, to distinguish critically
between letters that are readable and will survive by their own
literary quality, as fine specimens of the art, and those which are
preserved and published on the score of the writer's name and fame,
with little aid from their merits. In which category are we to place
the letters of Keats, including those that have been very recently
unearthed by diligent literary excavation? His poetry is so exquisite,
so radiant with imaginative colour, that to see such a man in the
light of common day, among the ordinary cares and circumstances of the
lower world, is necessarily a descent and a disillusion. He was young,
he was poor, he had few acquaintances worthy of him; he roved about
England and Scotland without adventures; his letters were perfectly
familiar and unsophisticated. As Mr. Sidney Colvin has written, in an
excellent preface to an edition of 1891, 'he poured out to those he
loved his whole self indiscriminately, generosity and fretfulness,
ardour and despondency, boyish petulance side by side with manful good
sense, the tattle of suburban parlours with the speculations of a
spirit unsurpassed for native gift and insight.' Every now and then
the level of his easygoing discourse is lit up by a flash of wit, and
occasionally by a jet of brilliant fancies among which some of his
finest poetry may be traced in the process of incubation. His whole
mind is set upon his art; for that only, and for a few intimate
friends, does he care to live and work; his letters often tell us when
and where, under what influences, his best pieces were composed; one
likes to know, for example, that the _Ode to Autumn_ came to him on a
fine September day during a Sunday's walk over the stubbles near
Winchester. His criticisms are always good, and their form
picturesque. He compares human life to a chamber that becomes
gradually darkened, in which one door after another is set open,
showing only dim passages leading out into darkness. This, he says, is
the burden of the mystery which Wordsworth felt and endeavoured to
explore; and he thinks that Wordsworth is deeper than Milton, though
he attributes this, justly, more to 'the general and gregarious
advance of intellect, than individual greatness of mind.' So far as
spontaneity and the free unguarded play of sportive and serious ideas,
taken as they came uppermost, are tests and conditions of excellence
in this kind of writing, Keats's letters must rank high. Nevertheless
there is still room for doubt whether these juvenile productions would
have left any but a most ephemeral mark apart from their connection
with his poetry.
In the case of other poets, who were his contemporaries, the verdict
will be different. They are all to be classed, though not in the same
line, as writers of letters that have great original and intrinsic
value. Scott's letters exhibit his generous and masculine nature; the
buoyancy of his spirits in good or bad fortune; and that romantic
attachment to old things and ideas which hardened latterly into
inveterate Toryism. Southey's prose writings will probably survive his
metrical compositions, which indeed have already fallen into oblivion.
There is life in a poet so long as he is quoted; but no verses or even
lines of Southey have fixed themselves in the popular memory. And
whereas the letters of Keats disclose a mind filled with the sense of
beauty and rich with poetic seedlings that blossomed into beautiful
flowers, in Southey's correspondence we discern only an erudite man of
taste labouring diligently upon epics which he expected to be
immortal. The letters of Byron stand upon broader ground, because
Byron was so much more of a personage than either Keats, or Southey,
or Wordsworth. They supply, in the first place, an invaluable, and
indeed indispensable, interpretation of his poetry, which is to a
great extent the imaginative and romantic presentation of his own
feelings, fortunes, and peculiar experiences. Secondly, they are full
of good sayings and caustic criticism; they touch upon the domain of
politics and society as well as upon literature; they give the
opinions passed upon contemporary events and persons, during a
stirring period of European history, by a man of genius who was also a
man of the world; they float on the current of a strangely troubled
existence. In these letters we have an important contribution to our
acquaintance with literary circles and London society, and with
several notable figures on either stage, during the years immediately
before and after Waterloo. They were published in an introduction to
the works of a famous poet; yet, although they cannot be detached from
his poetry, they possess great independent merits of their own. They
echo the sounds of revelry by night; they strike a note of careless
vivacity, the tone of a man who is at home alike in good and bad
company, whose judgment on books and politics, on writers and
speakers, is always fresh, bold, and original. We may lament that the
spirit of reckless devilry and dissipation should have entered into
Byron; and the lessons to be drawn from the scenes and adventures in
Venice and elsewhere, described for the benefit of Tom Moore, are very
different from the moral examples furnished by the tranquil and
well-ordered correspondence of our own day. Yet the world would have
been poorer for the loss of this memorial of an Unquiet Life, and the
historical gallery of literature would have missed the full-length
portrait of an extraordinary man.
The letters of Coleridge, like their writer, belong to another class,
yet, like Byron's, they have the clear-cut stamp of individuality.
Here again we have the man himself, with his intensity of feeling, his
erratic moods and singular phraseology, the softness of his heart and
the weakness of his will. He belongs to the rapidly diminishing class
of notable men who have freely poured their real sentiments and
thoughts out of their brain into their letters, who have given their
best (without keeping their worst) to their correspondents, so that
the letters abound with pathetic and amusing confessions, and with
ideas that bear the stamp of the author's singular idiosyncrasy. The
_Memorials of Coleorton_ are a collection of letters written to the
Beaumont family by Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, and Scott; the
reader may pass from one to another by taking them as they come; the
book is like the _menu_ of a dinner with varied courses. Wordsworth's
letters are the product of cultivated taste, a fine eye for rural
scenery, and lofty moral sentiment. Southey is the high-class
_litterateur_, with a strong dash of Toryism in Church and State; in
both there is a total absence of eccentricity, but in neither case is
the attention forcibly arrested or any striking passage retained. When
Coleridge is served up the flavour of unique expression and a sort of
divine simplicity is unmistakable; he is alternately indignant and
remorseful; he soars to themes transcendent, and sinks anon to the
humble details of his errors and embarrassments. Uncongenial society
plunged him into such dark depression that he is not ashamed to
confess that he found 'bodily relief in weeping.'
'On Tuesday evening Mr. R----, the author of ----, drank tea and
spent the evening with us at Grasmere; and this had produced a very
unpleasant effect upon my spirits.... If to be a poet or man of
genius entailed on us the necessity of housing such company in our
bosoms, I would pray the very flesh off my knees to have a head as
dark and unfurnished as Wordsworth's old Molly's.... If I believed
it possible that the man liked me, upon my soul I should feel
exactly as if I were tarred and feathered.'
And so on through the whole letter, with a comical energy of phrase
that scorns reserve or compass in giving vent to the misery caused by
uninteresting conversation. We may contrast this melancholy
tea-drinking with Byron's rollicking account of a dinner with some
friends 'of note and notoriety':
'Like other parties of the same kind, it was first silent, then
talking, then argumentative, then disputatious, then
unintelligible, then altogethery, then articulate, and then drunk.
When we had reached the last step of this glorious ladder it was
difficult to get down again without stumbling; and, to crown all,
Kinnaird and I had to conduct Sheridan down a damned corkscrew
staircase, which had been certainly constructed before the
invention of fermented liquors, and to which no legs, however
crooked, could possibly accommodate themselves. Both he and Coleman
were, as usual, very good; but I carried away much wine, and the
wine carried away my memory, so that all was hiccup and happiness
for the last hour or so, and I am not impregnated with any of the
conversation.'
We are, of course, not reviewing Byron or Coleridge; we are only
giving samples by the way. Here are two great poets, remote from each
other as the two poles in social circumstances and habit of mind, but
at any rate alike in this one quality--that their life is in their
letters, and that in such passages as these the genuine undisguised
temperament of each writer stands forth in a relief that could only be
brought out by his own unintentional master-strokes. For neither of
them was aware that in these scenes he was describing his own
character--though Byron may have intended to display his wit, and
Coleridge may have been to some extent conscious of his own humour. In
the way of literary criticism, again, Coleridge throws out the quaint
and uncommon remark upon Addison's Essays, that they 'have produced a
passion for the unconnected in the minds of Englishmen.' And he
touches delicately upon the negative or barren side of the critical
mind in his observation that the critics are the eunuchs that guard
the temple of the Muses.
Of Shelley's letters, again, we may say that they are unconsciously
autobiographical; they are confessions of character, spontaneous,
unguarded, abounding with brilliancies and extravagances. They betray
his shortcomings, but they attest his generosity and courage; they are
the outpourings of a new spirit, who detests what would now be called
Philistinism in literature and society; who does not stop to pick his
words, or to mix water with the red wine of his enthusiasm. He
abandons himself in his letters to the feelings of the moment; he
ardently pursues his immediate object by sophistical arguments which
convict himself but could never convince a correspondent, and which
astonish and amuse the calm reader of after days. 'A kind of
ineffable, sickening disgust seizes my mind when I think of this most
despotic, most unrequired fetter which prejudice has forged to confine
its energies.... Anti-matrimonialism is as necessarily connected with
scepticism as if religion and marriage began their course together,'
for both are the fruit of odious superstition. He was endeavouring to
persuade Harriet Westbrook to join him in testifying by example
against the obsolete and ignoble ceremony of the marriage service,
which he held to be a degradation that no one could ask 'an amiable
and beloved female' to undergo. In Shelley's case, as in Byron's, the
letters are of inestimable biographical value as witnesses to
character, as reflecting the vicissitudes of a life which was to the
writer more like the 'fierce vexation of a dream' than a well-spent
leisurely existence, and as the sincere unstudied expression of his
emotions. For all these reasons they are essential to a right
appreciation of his magnificent poetry.
William Godwin, pedantic, self-conceited, and impecunious, has come
down to us as a kind of central figure in a literary group which
included such men as Coleridge, Shelley, and Lamb, of whom the
somewhat formal English world at the beginning of this century was not
worthy. By reason of this position, and because Shelley married his
daughter, he became the cause and subject of excellent letter-writing,
though his own correspondence is heavy with philosophic platitudes. It
is of the class which, as we have said, is akin to essays; he
discourses at large upon first principles in religion and politics;
and out of his frigid philosophy came some of Shelley's most ardent
paradoxes. But some of the most amusing letters in the English
language were addressed to him. It was after a supper at Godwin's that
Coleridge wrote remorsefully acknowledging 'a certain tipsiness'--not
that he felt any 'unpleasant titubancy'--whereby he had been seduced
into defending a momentary idea as if it had been an old and firmly
established principle; which (we may add) has been the way of other
talkers since Coleridge. No one, he goes on to say, could have a
greater horror than himself of the principles he thus accidentally
propounded, or a deeper conviction of their irrationality; 'but the
whole thinking of my life will not bear me up against the crowd and
press of my mind, when it is elevated beyond its natural pitch.' The
effect of punch, after wine, was to make a philosopher argue hotly
against his profoundest beliefs; yet it is to Godwin's supper that we
owe this diverting palinodia. And all Englishmen should be grateful to
Godwin for having written the tragedy of _Antonio_; for not only was
it most justly damned, but it also elicited some letters to the
unlucky author that are unmatched in the record of candid criticism.
Mrs. Inchbald writes, briefly:
'I thank you for the play of Antonio, and I most sincerely wish you
joy of having produced a work which will protect you from being
classed with the successful dramatists of the present time, but
which will hand you down to posterity among the honoured few who,
during the past century, have totally failed in writing for the
stage.'
Coleridge goes to work more elaborately:
'In the tragedy I have frequently used certain marks (which he
gives). Of these, the first calls your attention to my suspicions
that your language is false or intolerable English. The second
marks the passages that struck me as _flat_ or mean. The third is a
note of reprobation, levelled at those sentences in which you have
adopted that worst sort of vulgar language, commonplace book
language. The last mark implies bad metre.'
All this is free speaking beyond the compass of modern literary
consultations. It may be added that Lamb also discussed the play,
before it was performed, in his letters to Godwin; and that his
description of Godwin's deportment, of his own feelings, and of the
behaviour of the audience on the memorable night that witnessed its
utter failure, has bequeathed to us a comedy over which the tragic
Muse herself might well become hysterical.
There is, indeed, in the correspondence of this remarkable group a
tone of frankness and sincerity which, combined with the absence of
malice and a strong element of fun, distinguishes it from the
half-veiled disapproval and prudish reserve of later days. 'When you
next write so eloquently and well against law and lawyers,' says
Coleridge to Godwin, 'be so good as to leave a larger place for your
wafer, as by neglect of this a part of your last was obliterated.'
Again, in a more serious tone, 'Ere I had yet read or seen your works,
I, at Southey's recommendation, wrote a sonnet in praise of the
author. When I had read them, religious bigotry, the but half
understanding of your principles, and the _not_ half understanding of
my own, combined to render me a warm and boisterous anti-Godwinist.'
His moods and circumstances, his joys and pains, are reflected in his
language with remarkable fertility of metaphor; his feelings vary with
his society. Of Lamb he writes that 'his taste acts so as to appear
like the mechanic simplicity of an instinct--in brief, he is worth a
hundred men of more talents: conversation with the latter tribe is
like the use of leaden bells, one warms by exercise, Lamb every now
and then _irradiates_.' In the best letters of this remarkable group
we perceive the exquisite sensitiveness of open and eager minds,
giving free play to their ideas and feelings, their delight and
disgust, so that their life and thoughts are mirrored in their
correspondence as in their conversation. Such writing has become very
rare, if it is not entirely extinct, in these latter days of temperate
living and guarded writing. Lamb's own letters are all in a similar
key; and that which he wrote to Coleridge, who had a bad habit of
borrowing books, is a model of jocose expostulation: 'You never come
but you take away some folio that is part of my existence.... My third
shelf from the top has two devilish gaps, where you have knocked out
its two eye teeth.' And his lament over the desolation of London, as
it appears to a man who has lived there jovially, and revisits it as a
stranger in after years, may even now touch a chord in the hearts of
some of us.
'In London I passed houses and places, empty caskets now. The
streets, the shops are left, but all old friends are gone. The
bodies I cared for are in graves or dispersed. My old clubs that
lived so long and flourished so steadily are crumbled away. When I
took leave of our friend at Charing Cross, 'twas heavy unfeeling
rain, and I had nowhere to go ... not a sympathising house to turn
to in the great city. Never did the waters of heaven pour down on a
forlorner head. Yet I tried ten days at a sort of friend's house,
large and straggling; one of the individuals of my old long knot of
friends, card-players, and pleasant companions, that have tumbled
to pieces into dust and other things; and I got home convinced that
I was better to get to my hole in Enfield and hide like a sick cat
in my corner.'
We might, indeed, multiply indefinitely our quotations from the
correspondence of this literary period to show its sincerity, its
spontaneity, its uncommonness, the tone of intimate brotherhood and
natural unruly affection that pervades it everywhere. Nothing of the
kind has come down to us from the eighteenth century; and the last
fifty years of this century, so prolific in biographies and posthumous
publications of the papers of eminent men, go to prove that in the
general transformation of letter-writing these peculiar qualities have
almost, though not altogether, disappeared. Probably conversation has
suffered a like change; and we may ascribe it generally to a lowering
of the social temperature, to the habits of reserve, respectability,
and conventional self-restraint that in these days govern so largely
the intercourse of men. Something may be due to cautious expurgation
of passages which tell against the writer, or might offend modern
taste; yet in other respects contemporary editors have been
sufficiently indiscreet. And the growth of these habits, so
discouraging to free and fearless correspondence, may be partly
ascribed to the influence of journalism, which makes every subject
stale and sterile by incessantly threshing and tearing at it, and
which reviews biographies in a manner that acts as a solemn warning to
all men of mark that they take heed what they put into a private
letter. There are other causes, to which we may presently advert; but
it is quite clear that this fine art is undergoing certain
transmutations, and that on the whole it does not flourish quite so
vigorously as heretofore.
In a recent article upon Matthew Arnold's letters it is laid down by a
consummate critic[8] that the first canon of unsophisticated
letter-writing is that a letter is meant for the eye of a friend, and
not for the world. 'Even the lurking thought in anticipation of an
audience destroys the charm; the best letters are always
improvisations; the public breaks the spell.' In this, as we have
already suggested, there is much truth; yet the conditions seem to us
too straitly enjoined; for not every man of genius has the gift of
striking out his best thoughts, in their best form, clear and true
from the hot iron of his mind; and in some of our best writers the
improvising spirit is very faint. If a man writes with leisurely care,
selecting deliberately the word that exactly matches his thought,
aiming directly at the heart of his subject and avoiding prolixity, he
may, like Walpole, Gray, and others, produce a delightful letter,
provided only that he is sincere and open, has good stuff to give, and
does not condescend to varnish his pictures. We want his best
thoughts; we should like to have his best form; we do not always care
so much for negligent undress. And as for the copious outpouring of
his personal feelings, one says many things to a friend or kinsman
that are totally without interest to the public, unless they are
expressed in some distinctive manner or embody some originality of
handling an ordinary event. This a writer may have the knack of doing
artistically, even in a private and confidential letter, without
betraying the touch of art; nor, indeed, can we ever know how many of
the best modern letters are really improvised. Then, again, with
regard to the anticipation of an audience, it is a risk to which
every man of note must feel that he is exposed; the shadow of
eventual publicity is always in the background; his letters have
passed out of his control during his lifetime, and he can only trust
in the uncertain discretion of his literary executor. He does not care
to leave the record of his passing moods, his confessions of weakness,
his personal likings and antipathies, to be discussed by the general
reader; and it is probable that he only lets his pen run freely when
he feels assured that his confidential improvisations will be
judiciously omitted.
It is, we think, impossible to suppose that these considerations have
not weighed materially upon the minds of eminent men in our own day,
when biographies have become so much more numerous, and when they are
so much more closely criticised than formerly. And in comparing the
letters written in the early part of this century--such as those from
which we have given a few characteristic quotations--with those which
have been recently published, we have to take account of these things,
among other changes of the social and literary environment.
Undoubtedly the comparison is to the advantage of the earlier
writings; they seem infinitely more amusing, more genuine, more
biographical, more redolent of the manners and complexion of the time.
There is in them a flavour of heartiness and irresponsibility which
may partly be attributed to the fact that the best writers were poets,
whose genius flowered as early as their manhood, and most of whom died
young; so that their letters are fresh, audacious, and untempered by
the chilly caution of middle or declining age. Their spirits were
high, they were ardent in the pursuit of ideals; they were defying
society, they either had no family or were at feud with it, and they
gave not a thought to the solemn verdict of posterity. For
correspondents who were brimming over with humour, imagination, and
enthusiasm, no situation could be more thoroughly favourable to
sparkling improvisation; and accordingly they have left us letters
which will be a joy for ever.
The correspondence of our own generation has been written under a
different intellectual climate, and various circumstances have
combined to lower the temperature of its vivacity. Posthumous
publicity is now the manifest destiny that overhangs the private life
of all notable persons, especially of popular authors, who can observe
and inwardly digest continual warnings of the treatment which they are
likely to receive from an insatiable and inconsistent criticism. They
may have lived long and altered their opinions; they may have
quarrelled with friends or rivals, and may have become sworn allies
later; they may have publicly praised one whom in private they may
have laughed at; for when you have to think what you say, it does not
follow that you say what you think. All these considerations, enforced
by repeated examples, are apt to damp the natural ardour of
improvisation; the more so because the writer may be sure either that
his genuine utterances will be suppressed by the editor, or that, if
they are produced, the editor will be roundly abused for giving him
away. For in these matters the judgment of the general reader is
wayward, and his attitude undecided, with a leaning toward hypocrisy.
The story of the domestic tribulations and the conjugal bickerings of
a great writer, of the irritability that belongs to highly nervous
temperaments, and which has always made genius, like the finest
animals, hard to domesticate, has lost none of its savour with the
public. But if all letters that record such scenes and sayings are
faithfully reproduced in preparing the votive tablet upon which the
dead man's life is to be delineated, the ungrateful reader answers
with an accusation of imprudence, indiscretion, and betrayal of
confidence; and the surviving friends protest still more vehemently.
Within the last three months these consequences have been forcibly
illustrated by the reception of Cardinal Manning's Life, in which the
letters are of extraordinary value toward the formation of a right
understanding of that remarkable personage. Much of all this
sensitiveness is clearly due to the hasty fashion of publishing
private correspondence within a few years of the writer's decease, but
more to the fitful and somewhat feminine temper of an inquisitive yet
censorious society.
If, on the other hand, expurgation is freely employed, the result is a
kind of emasculation. Nothing is left that can offend or annoy living
people, or that might damage the writer's own reputation with an
audience that enjoys, yet condemns, unmeasured confidences. And so we
get clever, sensible letters of men who have travelled, worked, and
mixed much in society, who have already put into essays or reviews all
that they wanted the public to know, and whose private doubts, or
follies, or frolics, have been neatly removed from their
correspondence. Let us take, for example, two batches of letters very
lately published, and written by two men who have left their mark upon
their generation. Of Dean Stanley it may be affirmed that no
ecclesiastic of his time was better known, or had a higher reputation
for strength of character and undaunted Liberalism. His public life
and his place in the Anglican Church had been already described in a
meritorious biography; and it might have been expected that these
letters would bring the reader closer to the man himself, would
accentuate the points of a striking individuality. There are few of
these letters, we think, by which such expectations have been
fulfilled to any appreciable degree. In one or two of them Stanley
writes with his genuine sincerity and earnestness on the state of his
mind in regard to the new spirit of ecclesiasticism that had arisen in
Oxford nearly sixty years ago; we see that he saw and felt the
magnitude of a coming crisis, and we can observe the formation of the
opinions which he consistently and valiantly upheld throughout his
career. The whole instinct of his intellectual nature--and he never
lost his trust in reason--was against the high Roman or sacerdotal
absolutism in matters of dogma; he ranked Morals far above Faith; and
he had that dislike of authoritative uniformity in church government
which is in Englishmen a reflection of their political habits. Yet he
discerned plainly enough the spring of a movement that was bringing
about a Roman Catholic revival.
'Not that I am turned or turning Newmanist, but that I do feel that
the crisis in my opinions is coming on, and that the difficulties I
find in my present views are greater than I thought them to be, and
that here I am in the presence of a magnificent and consistent
system shooting up on every side, whilst all that I see against it
is weak and grovelling.' (Letter to C. J. Vaughan, 1838.)
'I expect,' he writes a year later, 'that the whole thing will have
the effect of making me either a great Newmanite or a great Radical';
and it did end in making him an advanced Liberal. His practical
genius, and his free converse with general society (from which Manning
deliberately turned away as fatal to ecclesiasticism), very soon
parted him from the theologians.
'I think it is true,' he writes to Jowett (1849), 'that we have not
the same mental interest in talking over subjects of theology that
we had formerly. They have lost their novelty, I suppose; we know
better where we are, having rolled to the bottom together, and
being now able only to make a few uphill steps. I acknowledge fully
my own want of freshness; my mind seems at times quite dried up....
And at times I have felt an unsatisfied desire after a better and
higher sort of life, which makes me impatient of the details of
theology.'
In these, and perhaps one or two other passages, we can trace the
development of character and convictions in the man to whom Jowett
wrote, thirty years afterwards, that he was 'the most distinguished
clergyman in the Church of England, who could do more than any one
towards the great work of placing religion on a rational basis.'[9]
But, on the whole, the quality of these letters is by no means equal
to their quantity; and too many of them belong to a class which,
though it may have some ephemeral interest among friends and kinsfolk,
can retain, we submit, no permanent value at all. It is best described
under a title common in French literature--_impressions de voyage_. A
very large part of the volume consists of letters written by Stanley,
an intelligent and indefatigable tourist, from the countries and
cities which he visited, from Petersburg and Palestine, from Paris and
Athens, from Spain and Scotland. The standpoint from which he surveys
the Holy Land is rather historical and archaeological than devotional;
but he had everywhere a clear eye for the picturesque in manners and
scenery. He had excellent opportunities of seeing the places and the
people; his descriptive powers are considerable; and there is a finely
drawn picture of All Souls' Day in the Sistine Chapel, written from
Rome to Hugh Pearson, although a ludicrous incident comes in at the
end like a false note. Such correspondence might be so arranged
separately as to make an interesting narrative of travel, but when
judged by a high literary or intellectual criterion of letter-writing
it is out of court. It is not too much to aver that most, if not all,
of these letters might have been written by any refined and cultivated
Englishman, whose education and social training had given him correct
tastes and a many-sided interest in the world. They belong to the type
of private diary or chronicle, and as such they inevitably include
trivialities, though not many. Some of Stanley's letters are from
Scotland, where he travels about admiring its wildness, and with a
cultured interest in its antiquities. But no country has been better
ransacked in search of the picturesque; it is the original
hunting-ground of the romantic tourist, and what Stanley said about it
to his family is pleasantly but not powerfully written. It is more
than doubtful whether excellence in letter-writing lies that way, or,
indeed, whether mediocrity is avoidable. Charles Lamb's letters are
none the worse because he stayed in London and had no time for the
beauties of Nature.
'For my part,' he wrote, 'with reference to my friends northwards,
I must confess that I am not romance-bit about Nature. The earth
and sea and sky (when all is said) is but a house to dwell in. If
the inmates be courteous, and good liquors flow like the conduits
at an old coronation, if they can talk sensibly and feel properly,
I have no need to stand staring at the gilded looking-glass, nor at
the five-shilling print over the mantelpiece. Just as important to
me (in a sense) is all the furniture of my world; eye pampering,
but satisfies no heart.'
This may be Cockney taste, yet it is better reading than Stanley's
account of Edinburgh or the valley of Glencoe.
The editor assures us, in his preface, that none of these letters
touch upon theological controversies, yet many readers might have been
very willing to part with some of the travelling journal for closer
knowledge of Stanley's inward feelings while he was bearing up the
fight of liberty and toleration against the gathering forces that have
since scattered and well-nigh overwhelmed the once flourishing Broad
Church party. Well might Jowett write to him in 1880, 'You and I, and
our dear friend Hugh Pearson, and William Rogers, and some others, are
rather isolated in the world, and we must hold together as long as we
can.' All those who are here named have passed away, leaving no party
leaders of equal rank and calibre, and if Stanley's letters survive at
all, they will live upon those passages which remind us how
strenuously he contended for the intellectual freedom that he believed
to be the true spiritual heritage of English churchmen.
The latest contribution to the department of national literature that
we have been surveying is the volume containing the letters of Matthew
Arnold (1848-88). 'Here and there,' writes their editor, 'I have been
constrained, by deference to living susceptibilities, to make some
slight excisions; but with regard to the bulk of the letters this
process had been performed before the manuscript came into my hands.'
No one has any business to question the exercise of a discretion which
must have been necessary in publishing private correspondence so
recently written, and only those who saw the originals can decide
whether they have been weakened or strengthened by the pruning. On the
other hand, the first canon of unsophistical letter-writing, as laid
down by the eminent critic already cited--that they should be written
for the eye of a friend, never for the public--is amply fulfilled. 'It
will be seen' (we quote again from the preface) 'that the letters are
essentially familiar and domestic, and were evidently written without
a thought that they would ever be read beyond the circle of his
family.' They are, in short, mostly family letters that have been
necessarily subjected to censorship, and it would be unreasonable to
measure a collection of this kind by the high standard that qualifies
for admission to the grade of permanent literature. As these letters
are to supply the lack of a biography (which was expressly prohibited
by his own wish), we are not to look for further glimpses of a
character which his editor rightly terms 'unique and fascinating.' The
general reader may therefore feel some disappointment at finding that
the correspondence takes no wider or more varied range; for Matthew
Arnold's circle of acquaintances must have been very large, and he
must have been in touch with the leading men in the political,
academical, and official society of his day.
The letters are as good as they could be expected to be under these
conditions, which are to our mind heavily disadvantageous. We must set
aside those which fall under the class of _impressions de voyage_, for
the reasons already stated in discussing Stanley's travelling
correspondence. One would not gather from this collection that Arnold
was a considerable poet. And the peculiar method of expression, the
vein of light irony, the flexibility of style, that distinguish his
prose works are here curiously absent; he does not write his letters,
as Carlyle did, in the same character as his books. Yet the turn of
thought, the prevailing note, can be often detected; as, for instance,
in a certain impatience with English defects, coupled with a strong
desire to take the conceit out of his fellow-countrymen:
'The want of independence of mind, the shutting their eyes and
professing to believe what they do not, the running blindly
together in herds for fear of some obscure danger and horror if
they go alone, is so eminently a vice of the English, I think, of
the last hundred years, has led them and is leading them into such
scrapes and bewilderment, that,' etc., etc.
It is certainly hard to recognise in this picture the features of the
rough roving Englishman who in the course of the last hundred years
has conquered India, founded great colonies, and fought the longest
and most obstinate war of modern times: who has been the type of
insularity and an incurable antinomian in religion and politics. Not
many pages afterwards, however, we find Arnold sharing with the herd
of his countrymen the shallow 'conviction as to the French always
beating any number of Germans who come into the field against them.'
He adds that 'they will never be beaten by any other nation but the
English, for to every other nation they are in efficiency and
intelligence decidedly superior'--an opinion which contradicts his
previous judgment of them, and replaces the national superiority on a
lofty though insecure basis; for if he was wrong about the French, he
may be wrong about us whom he puts above them. Arnold admired the
French as much as Carlyle liked the Germans, and both of them enjoyed
ridiculing or rating the English; but each was unconsciously swayed by
his own particular tastes and temperament, and neither of them had the
gift of political prophecy, which is, indeed, very seldom vouchsafed
to the highly imaginative mind. He had a strong belief, rare among
Englishmen, in administrative organisation. 'Depend upon it,' he
writes, 'that the great States of the Continent have two great
elements of cohesion, in their administrative system and in their
army, which we have not.' The general conclusion which Arnold seems to
have drawn from his travels in Europe and America is that England was
far behind France in lucidity of ideas, and inferior to the United
States in straightforward political energy and the faculties of
national success. 'Heaven forbid that the English nation should become
like this (the French) nation; but Heaven forbid that it should remain
as it is. If it does, it will be beaten by America on its own line,
and by the Continental nations on the European line. I see this as
plain as I see the paper before me.' Since this was written in 1865,
England has been perversely holding her own course, nor has she yet
fulfilled Arnold's melancholy foreboding, by which he was 'at times
overwhelmed with depression' that England was sinking into a sort of
greater Holland, 'for want of perceiving how the world is going and
must go, and preparing herself accordingly.'
On the other hand, his imaginative faculty comes out in his
speculation upon the probable changes in the development of the
American people that might follow their separation into different
groups, if the civil war between the Northern and Southern States
(which had just begun) should break up the Union.
'Climate and mixture of race will then be able fully to tell, and I
cannot help thinking that the more diversity of nation there is on
the American continent, the more chance there is of one nation
developing itself with grandeur and richness. It has been so in
Europe. What should we all be if we had not one another to check us
and to be learned from? Imagine an English Europe. How frightfully
_borne_ and dull! Or a French Europe either, for that matter.'
The suggestion is, perhaps, more fanciful than profound; for history
does not repeat itself; and, in fact, the result of breaking up South
America into a dozen political groups has not yet produced any very
satisfactory development of national character. Much more than
political subdivision goes to the creation of a new Europe;
nevertheless Arnold is probably right in supposing that uniformity of
institutions and a somewhat monotonous level of social conditions over
a vast area, may have depressed and stunted the free and diversified
growth of North American civilisation.
The literary criticism to be found in these letters shows a fastidious
and delicate taste that had been nurtured almost too exclusively upon
the masterpieces of classic antiquity. Homer he ranked far above
Shakespeare, though one might think them too different for comparison;
and he praises 'two articles in _Temple Bar_ (1869), one on Tennyson,
the other on Browning,' which were afterwards republished in a book
that made some stir in its day, and has brought down upon its author
the unquenchable resentment of his brother poets. He thought that both
Macaulay and Carlyle were encouraging the English nation in its
emphatic Philistinism, and thus counteracting his own exertions to
lighten the darkness of earnest but opaque intelligences. As his
interest in religious movements was acute, so his observations
occasionally throw some light upon the exceedingly complicated problem
of ascertaining the general drift of the English mind in regard to
things spiritual. The force which is shaping the future, is it with
the Ritualists or with the undogmatical disciples of a purely moral
creed? With neither, Arnold replies; not with any of the orthodox
religions, nor with the neo-religious developments which are
pretending to supersede them.
'Both the one and the other give to what they call religion, and to
religious ideas and discussions, too large and absorbing a place in
human life. Man feels himself to be a more various and richly
endowed animal than the old religious theory of human life
allowed, and he is endeavouring to give satisfaction to the long
suppressed and imperfectly understood instincts of their varied
nature.'
No man studied more closely than Arnold the intellectual tendencies of
his generation, so that on the most difficult of contemporary
questions this opinion is worth quoting, although the ritualistic
leanings of the present day hardly operate to support it. But here, as
in his published works, his religious utterances are somewhat
ambiguous and oracular; and one welcomes the marking of a definite
epoch in Church history when he writes emphatically that 'the Broad
Church _among the clergy_ may be said to have almost perished with
Stanley.'
But correspondence that was never meant for publication is hardly a
fair subject for literary criticism. Arnold seems to have written
hurriedly, in the intervals of hard work, of journeyings to and fro
upon his rounds of inspection, and of much social bustle; he had not
the natural gift of letter-writing, and he probably did it more as a
duty than a pleasure. He had none of the ever-smouldering irritability
which compelled Carlyle to slash right and left of him at the people
whom he met, at everything that he disliked, and every one whom he
despised. Nor was he born to chronicle the small beer of everyday life
in that spirit of contemplative quietism which is bred out of abundant
leisure and retirement. A few lines from one of Cowper's letters may
serve to indicate the circumstances in which 'our best letter-writer,'
as Southey calls him, lived and wrote a hundred years ago in a muddy
Buckinghamshire village:
'A long confinement in the winter, and indeed for the most part in
the autumn too, has hurt us both. A gravel walk, thirty yards
long, affords but indifferent scope to the locomotive faculty; yet
it is all that we have had to move in for eight months in the year,
during thirteen years that I have been a prisoner here.'
If we compare this manner of spending one's days with Arnold's hasty
and harassed existence among the busy haunts of men, we can understand
that in this century a hard-working literary man has neither the taste
nor the time for the graceful record of calm meditations, or for
throwing a charm over commonplace details. And, on the whole, Arnold's
correspondence, though it has some biographical value, must
undoubtedly be relegated to the class of letters that would never have
been published upon their own intrinsic merits.
Carlyle's letters, on the other hand, fall into the opposite category;
they stand on their own feet, they are as significant of style and
character as Arnold's, and even Stanley's, letters were comparatively
insignificant; they are the fearless outspoken expression of the
humours and feelings of the moment, and it is probable that the writer
did not trouble himself to consider whether they would or would not be
published. In these respects they as nearly fulfil the authorised
conditions of good letter-writing as any work of the sort that has
been produced in our own generation, though one may be permitted some
doubt in regard to improvisation; for the work is occasionally so
clean cut and pointed, his strokes are so keen and straight to the
mark, that it is difficult to believe the composition to be altogether
unstudied. Whether any writer ever excelled in this or, indeed, in any
other branch of the art literary without taking much trouble over it,
is, in our judgment, an open question; but surely Carlyle must have
selected and sharpened with some care the barbed epithets upon which
he suspends his grotesque and formidable caricatures.
For example, he writes, in 1831, of Godwin, who still figures, in
advanced age, as a martyr in the cause of good letter-writing--'A
bald, bushy browed, thick, hoary, hale little figure, with a very long
blunt characterless nose--the whole visit the most unutterable
stupidity.' Lord Althorp is 'a thick, large, broad-whiskered,
farmer-looking man.' O'Connell, 'a well-doing country shopkeeper with
a bottle-green frock and brown scratch wig.... I quitted them all (the
House of Commons) with the highest contempt.' Of Thomas Campbell, the
poet, it is written that 'his talk is small, contemptuous, and
shallow; his face has a smirk which would befit a shopman or an
auctioneer.' Wordsworth, 'an old, very loquacious, indeed, quite
prosing man.' Southey 'the shallowest chin, prominent snubbed Roman
nose, small carelined brow, the most vehement pair of faint hazel eyes
I have ever seen.' There is a savage caricature of Roebuck, and so
Carlyle goes on hanging up portraits of the notables whom he met and
conversed with, to the great edification of these latter days. No more
dangerous interviewer has ever practised professionally than this
artist in epithets, on whom the outward visible figure of a man
evidently made deep impressions; whereas the ordinary letter-writer is
usually content to record the small talk. As material for publication
his correspondence had three singular advantages. His earlier letters
were excellent, and we may hazard the generalisation that almost all
first-class letter-writing, like poetry, has been inspired by the
ardour and freshness and audacity of youth. He lived so long that
these letters could be published very soon after his death without
much damage to the susceptibilities of those whom his hard hitting
might concern; and, lastly, his biographer was a man of nerve, who
loved colour and strong lineaments, and would always sacrifice minor
considerations to the production of a striking historical portrait.
Undoubtedly, Carlyle's letters have this virtue--that they largely
contribute to the creation of a true likeness of the writer, for in
sketching other people he was also drawing himself. He could also
paint the interior of a country house, as at Fryston, and his
landscapes are vivid. He was, in short, an impressionist of the first
order, who grouped all his details in subordination to a general
effect, and never gave his correspondent a mere catalogue of trivial
particulars.
It was originally in a letter to his brother that Carlyle wrote his
celebrated description of an interview with Coleridge. No two men
could be more different in taste or temperament, and yet any one who
reads attentively Coleridge's letters may observe a certain similarity
to Carlyle's writing, not only in the figured style and prophetic
manner, but also in the tendency of their political ideas. In the
matter of linguistic eccentricities, it may be guessed that both of
them had been affected by the study of German literature; and in
politics they had both a horror of disorder, an aversion to the
ordinary Radicalism of their day, and a contempt for mechanic
philosophy and complacent irreligion. Each of them had a strong belief
in the power and duties of the State; but Coleridge held also that
salvation lay in a reconstitution of the Church on a sound
metaphysical basis, whereas for Carlyle all articles and liturgies
were dying or dead. A comparison of these two supreme intellectual
forces may help us to distinguish some of the most favourable
conditions of good letter-writing. They were men of highly nervous
mental constitution of mind, on whom the ideas and impressions that
had been secreted produced an excitability that was discharged upon
correspondents in a torrent of language, sweeping away considerations
of reserve or self-regard, and submerging the commonplace bits of news
and everyday observations which accumulate in the letters of
respectable notabilities. To whomsoever the letters may be addressed,
they are in consequence equally good and characteristic. Carlyle's
epistles to his wife and brother are among the best in the collection;
and Coleridge threw himself with the same ardour into letters to
Charles Lamb and to Lord Liverpool. It is this capacity for pouring
out the soul in correspondence, for draining the bottom of one's heart
to a friend, which, combined with exaltation under the stimulus of
spleen or keen sensibility, raises correspondence to the high-water
mark of English literature.
But in saying that these conditions are eminently favourable to the
production of fine letter-writing, we do not mean to affirm that they
are essential. Against such a theory it would be sufficient to quote
Cowper, though he had the poetic fire, and was subject to the
religious frenzy; and we know that repose and refinement have a
tendency to develop good correspondents. Among these we may number
Edward FitzGerald, whose letters are, perhaps, the most artistic of
any that have recently appeared, and may be placed without hesitation
in the class of letters that have a high intrinsic merit independently
of the writer's extraneous reputation; for FitzGerald was a recluse
with a tinge of misanthropy, nearly unknown to the outer world, except
by one exquisite paraphrase of a Persian poem, and his popularity
rests almost entirely upon his published correspondence. Of these
letters, so excellent of their kind, can it be said that they have the
note of improvisation, that they were written for a friend's eye,
without thought or care for that ordeal of posthumous publication
which has added, as we have been told, a fresh terror to death? The
composition is exactly suited to the tone of easy, pleasant
conversation; the writing has a serene flow, with ripples of wit and
humour; sometimes occupied with East Anglian rusticities and local
colouring, sometimes with pungent literary criticisms; it is never
exuberant, but nowhere dull or commonplace; the language is concise,
with a sedulous nicety of expression. A man of delicate irony, living
apart from the rough, tumbling struggle for existence, he was in most
things the very opposite to Carlyle, whose _French Revolution_ he
admired not much, and who, he thinks, 'ought to be laughed at a
little.' Such a man was not likely to write even the most ordinary
letter without a certain degree of mental preparation, without some
elaboration of thought, or solicitude as to form and finish, for all
which processes he had ample leisure. It may be noticed that he never
condescends to the travelling journal, and that his voyaging
impressions are given in a few fine strokes; but, although he was a
home-keeping Englishman, he was free from household cares, nor did he
keep up that obligatory family correspondence which, when it is
published to exhibit the domestic habits and affections of an eminent
person, becomes ever after a dead-weight upon his biography.
In endeavouring to analyse the charm of these delightful letters, we
may suggest that they gain their special flavour from his talent for
compounding them, like a skilful _chef de cuisine_, out of various
materials or intellectual condiments assorted and dexterously blended.
He is an able and accomplished egoist, one of the few modern
Englishmen who are able to plant themselves contentedly, like a tree,
in one spot, and who prefer books to company, the sedentary to the
stirring life. He was not cut off, like Cowper, a hundred years
earlier, from the outer world in winter and rough weather, yet he had
few visitors and went abroad little; so that he had ample leisure for
perusal and re-perusal of the classic masterpieces, ancient and
modern, and for surveying the field of contemporary literature. His
letters to Fanny Kemble have the advantage of unity in tone that
belongs to a series written to the same person, though the absence of
replies is apt to produce the effect of a monologue. How far good
letter-writing depends upon the course of exchange, upon the stimulus
of pleasant and prompt replies, is a question not easily answered,
since the correspondence on both sides of two good writers is very
rarely put together. Mrs. Kemble had certain fixed rules which must
have been fatal to the free epistolary spirit. 'I never write,' she
said, 'until I am written to; I always write when I am written to, and
I make a point of always returning the same amount of paper that I
receive;' but at any rate it is evident that FitzGerald's letters to
her were regularly answered. He had a light hand on descriptions of
season and scenery; he could give the autumnal atmosphere, the
awakening of leaf and flower in spring, the distant roar of the German
Ocean on the East Anglian coast. As he could record his daily life
without the minute prolixity of a diary, so he could throw off
criticisms on books without falling into the manner of an essayist. In
regard to the 'fuliginous and spasmodic Carlyle,' he asks doubtfully
whether he with all his genius will not subside into the Level that
covers, and consists of, decayed literary vegetation. 'And Dickens,
with all _his_ genius, but whose Men and Women act and talk already
after a more obsolete fashion than Shakespeare's?' None of the
contemporary poets--Tennyson, Browning, or Swinburne--seem to have
entirely satisfied him; he loved the quiet landscapes and rural tales
of Crabbe, who is now read by very few; and he quotes with manifest
enjoyment the lines:
'In a small cottage on the rising ground,
West of the waves, and just beyond the sound.'
'The sea,' he writes, 'somehow talks to one of old things,' probably
because it is changeless by comparison with the land; and a man whose
life is still and solitary is affected by the transitory aspect of
natural things, because he can watch them pass. As old friends drop
off he touches in his letters upon the memories of days that are gone,
and he consorts more and more with the personages of his favourite
poets and romancers, living thus, as he says, among shadows.
Here is a man to whom correspondence was a real solace and a vehicle
of thought and feeling, not a mere note-book of travel, nor a conduit
of confidential small talk. A faint odour of the seasons hangs round
some of these letters, of the sunshine and rain, of dark days and
roads blocked with snow, of the first spring crocus and the faded
autumnal garden plots. We can perceive that, as his retirement became
habitual with increasing age, the correspondence became his main
outlet of ideas and sensations, taking more and more the place of
friendly visits and personal discussion as a channel of intercourse
with the external world. The Hindu sages despised action as
destructive of thought; and undoubtedly the cool secluded vale of life
is good for the cultivation of letter-writing, in one who has the
artistic hand, and to whom this method of gathering up the fruits of
reading and meditation, the harvest of a quiet eye, comes easily. In
many respects the letters of FitzGerald, like his life, are in strong
contrast to Carlyle's; and FitzGerald was somewhat startled by the
publication of Carlyle's 'Reminiscences.' He thinks that, on the
whole, 'they had better have been kept unpublished;' though on reading
the 'Biography' he writes: 'I did not know that Carlyle was so good,
grand, and even lovable, till I read the letters which Froude now
edits.' He himself was not likely to give the general reader more than
he wished to be known about his private affairs; and if one or two
remarks with a sting in them appeared when these letters were first
published in a magazine, they have been carefully excerpted from the
book. The mellow music of his tones, the self-restraint and meditative
attitude, are pleasant to the reader after the turbid utterances and
twisted language of Carlyle; we may compare the stirring rebellious
spirit brooding over the folly of mankind with the man who takes
humanity as he finds it, and is content to make the best of a world in
which he sees not much, beyond art and nature and a few old friends,
to interest him. Upon the whole, we may place Carlyle and FitzGerald,
each in his very different manner, at the head of all the
letter-writers of the generation to which they belong, which is not
precisely our own. It is to be recollected that a man must be dead
before he can win reputation in this particular branch of literature,
and that he cannot be fairly judged until time has removed many
obstacles to unreserved publication. But both Carlyle and FitzGerald
had long lives.
Mr. Stevenson, whose letters are the latest important contribution to
this department of the national library, died early, in the full force
of his intellect, at the zenith of his fame as a writer of romance.
His letters have been edited by Mr. Sidney Colvin, with all the
sympathy and insight into character that are inspired by congenial
tastes and close friendship; and his preface gives an excellent
account of the conditions, physical and mental, under which they were
written, and of the limitations observed in the editing of them.
'Begun,' Mr. Colvin says, 'without a thought of publicity, and
simply to maintain an intimacy undiminished by separation, they
assumed in the course of two or three years a bulk so considerable,
and contained so much of the matter of his daily life and thoughts,
that it by-and-by occurred to him ... that "some kind of a book"
might be extracted out of them after his death.... In a
correspondence so unreserved, the duty of suppression and selection
must needs be delicate. Belonging to the race of Scott and Dumas,
of the romantic narrators and creators, Stevenson belonged no less
to that of Montaigne and the literary egotists.... He was a
watchful and ever interested observer of the motions of his own
mind.'
The whole passage, too long to be quoted, suggests an instructive
analysis of the mental qualities and disposition that go to make a
good letter-writer--a dash of egotism, sensitiveness to outward
impressions, literary charm, the habit of keeping a frank and familiar
record of every day's moods, thoughts, and doings, the picturesque
surroundings of a strange land. In these journal letters from Samoa
the canon of improvisation is to a certain extent infringed, for
Stevenson wrote with publicity in distant view; and the depressing
influence of remoteness is in his case overcome, for he lived in
tropical Polynesia, 'far off amid the melancholy main,' and had speech
with his correspondent only at long intervals. But it is the privilege
of genius to disconcert the rules of criticism; the letters have none
of the vices of the diary, the trivialities are never dull, the
incidents are uncommon or uncommonly well told, and the writer is
never caught looking over his shoulder at posterity.
For extracts there is now little space left in this article; but we
may quote, to show Stevenson's style of landscape-painting, a few
lines describing a morning in Samoa after a heavy gale:
'I woke this morning to find the blow quite ended. The heaven was
all a mottled grey; even the East quite colourless. The downward
slope of the island veiled in wafts of vapour, blue like smoke; not
a leaf stirred on the tallest tree. Only three miles below me on
the barrier reef I could see the individual breakers curl and fall,
and hear their conjunct roaring rise, like the roar of a
thoroughfare close by.'
It is good for the imaginative letter-writer to live within sight and
sound of the sea, to hear the long roll, and to see from his window 'a
nick of the blue Pacific.' It is also good for him to be within range
of savage warfare, and to take long rough rides in a disturbed
country. On one such occasion he writes:
'Conceive such an outing, remember the pallid brute that lived in
Skerryvore like a weevil in a biscuit, and receive the intelligence
that I was rather the better for my journey. Twenty miles ride,
sixteen fences taken, ten of the miles in a drenching rain, seven
of them fasting and in the morning chill, and six stricken hours'
political discussions with an interpreter; to say nothing of
sleeping in a native house, at which many of our excellent literati
would look askance of itself.'
The feat might not seem miraculous to a captain of frontier irregulars
in hard training; but for a delicate novelist in weak health it was
pluckily done. These letters would be readable if Stevenson had
written nothing else, though of course their worth is doubled by our
interest in a man of singular talent who died prematurely. They
illustrate the tale of his life and portray his character; and they
form an addition, valuable in itself, and unique as a variety, to the
series of memorable English letter-writers.
Mr. Colvin mentions, in his preface, that Stevenson's talk was
irresistibly sympathetic and inspiring, full of matter and mirth. It
cannot be denied that between correspondence and conversation,
regarded as fine arts, there is a close kinship; and very similar
reasons have been alleged for the common belief that both are on the
decline. Whether such a belief has any solid foundation in the case of
letter-writing, we may be warranted in doubting. Observations of this
sort, which have a false air of acuteness and profundity, are repeated
periodically. The remark so constantly made at this moment, that
nowadays people read nothing but magazines, was made by Coleridge
early in this century; and Southey prophesied the ruin of good letters
from the penny post. It is true that the number of letters written
must have increased enormously; it is also true that many more are
published than heretofore, and that as a great many of these are not
above mediocrity, are valueless as literature, and of little worth
biographically, they produce on the disappointed reader the effect of
a general depreciation of the standard. Nevertheless, this article
will have been written to little purpose, unless it has shown fair
cause for rejecting such a conclusion, and for maintaining that,
although fine letter-writers, like poets, are few and far between, yet
they have not been wanting in our own time, and are not likely to
disappear. There will always be men, like Coleridge or Carlyle, whose
impetuous thoughts and humoristic conceptions cannot perpetually
submit to the forms and limitations and delays of printing and
publishing, but must occasionally demand instant liberation and
prompt delivery by the natural process of private letters. And
although the stir and bustle of the world is increasing, so that quiet
corners in it are not easily kept, yet it is probable that the race of
literary recluses--of those who pass their days in reading books, in
watching the course of affairs, and in corresponding with a select
circle of friends--will also continue. Whether Englishwomen, who write
letters up to a certain point better than Englishmen, will now rise,
as Frenchwomen have done, to the highest line, and why they have not
done so heretofore, are points that we have no space here for taking
up.
But it is the exceptional peculiarity of letters, as a form of
literature, that the writer can never superintend their publication.
During his lifetime he has no control over them, they are not in his
hands; and they do not appear until after his death. He must rely
entirely, therefore, upon the discretion of his editor, who has to
balance the wishes of a family, or the susceptibilities of an
influential party in politics or religion, against his own notions of
duty toward a departed friend, or against his artistic inclination
toward presenting to the world a true and unvarnished picture of some
remarkable personage. He may resolve, as Froude did in the case of
Carlyle, that 'the sharpest scrutiny is the condition of enduring
fame,' and may determine not to conceal the frailties or the
underlying motives which explain conduct and character. He may refuse,
as in the case of Cardinal Manning, to set up a smooth and whitened
monumental effigy, plastered over with colourless panegyric, and may
insist on showing a man's true proportions in the alternate light and
shadow through which every life naturally and inevitably passes. But
such considerations would lead us beyond our special subject into the
larger field of Biography; and we must be content, on the present
occasion, with this endeavour to sketch in bare outline the history
and development of English letter-writing, and to examine very briefly
the elementary conditions that conduce to success in an art that is
universally practised, but in which high excellence is so very rarely
attained.
FOOTNOTES:
[7] (1) _The Letters of Charles Lamb._ Edited, with Introduction and
Notes, by Alfred Ainger. London, 1888. (2) _Letters of John Keats to
his Family and Friends._ Edited by Sidney Colvin. London, 1891. (3)
_Letters and Verses of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley._ Edited by Rowland E.
Prothero. London, 1895. (4) _Letters of Matthew Arnold_, 1848-88.
Collected and arranged by George Russell. London and New York, 1895.
(5) _Letters of Edward FitzGerald to Fanny Kemble._ Edited by William
Aldis Wright. London, 1895. (6) _Vailima Letters, from Robert Louis
Stevenson to Sidney Colvin_, 1890-94. London, 1895.--_Edinburgh
Review_, April 1896.
[8] Mr. John Morley, _Nineteenth Century_, December 1895.
[9] _Dean Stanley's Letters_, p. 440.
THACKERAY
It is remarkable that in a century which is far more profusely
supplied with biographies than any preceding age, and at a time when
chronicles of small beer no less than of fine vintages seem to gratify
the rather indiscriminate taste of the British public, no formal life
has ever been produced of Thackeray. That this omission has been due
to his express wish is well understood, and at any rate it may be
cited as a praiseworthy breach of the latter-day custom of publishing
a man's private affairs and correspondence as soon as possible after
his funeral. Nevertheless the generation of those who knew Thackeray,
for whom and among whom he wrote, is now rapidly vanishing; so that it
would have been a kind of national misfortune if posterity had been
left without some authentic record of his personal history, his
earlier experiences, his characteristic sayings and doings, and the
general environment in which he worked.
For the biographical introductions, therefore, which are appended to
each volume of this new edition,[10] we owe gratitude to his daughter,
Mrs. Richmond Ritchie.[11] No more than seven volumes have been
actually published up to this date, but since these include a large
proportion of Thackeray's most important and characteristic work, we
make no apology for anticipating the completion of the series by an
attempt to make a critical examination of the salient points which
distinguish his genius, and mark his place in general literature. Mrs.
Ritchie tells us in a brief prefatory note that although her father's
wishes have prevented her from writing his complete biography she has
at last determined to publish memories which chiefly concern his
books. Her desire has also been 'to mark down some of the truer chords
to which his life was habitually set'; and accordingly we have in
every volume an instalment, too brief and intermittent for such
interesting matter, of the incidents and vicissitudes belonging to
successive stages of his life and work, with glimpses of his mind and
tastes, of the friendships that he made, and the society in which he
moved. The form in which these reminiscences and _reliquiae_ appear has
necessarily disconnected them, since they have been evidently chosen
on the plan of connecting each novel with the circumstances or
particular field of observation which may have suggested the plot, the
scenery, or the characters. One can thus see that Thackeray's mind,
like his sketch-book, was constantly taking down vivid impressions of
people and places, and in some of his notes of travel can be easily
traced the sources whence he took hints for elaborate studies. But
under this arrangement the chronology becomes here and there somewhat
entangled. _Pendennis_, for example, was finished in 1850, but as the
hero's life at Oxbridge is described in the novel, its introduction
takes us back to the period when the writer himself was at Cambridge
in 1829. _Vanity Fair_, again, written in 1845, contains a well-known
episode of Dobbin's school life, and the story carries us more than
once to the Continent; so the introduction gives us recollections of
Charterhouse, where Thackeray went in 1822, and of travels about
Germany in the early thirties. The _Contributions to Punch_, which
form the sixth volume of this series, began in 1842, and lasted ten
years. They provide occasion for many diverting anecdotes, and for
references to his colleagues who founded the fortunes of that most
successful of comic papers; but as on this plan the biographical lines
cross and recross each other it is not easy for the reader to obtain a
connected or comprehensive view of Thackeray's career. Nevertheless as
the system fortunately affords room and reason for giving many fresh
details of his daily life, with some of his letters, or extracts from
them, which are fresh and amusing, we may cheerfully pass over these
petty drawbacks. We are heartily thankful for our admission to a
closer acquaintance with an author who has drawn some immortal
pictures of English society, its manners, prejudices, and
characteristic types, in novels that will always hold the first rank
in our lighter literature.
How his boyhood was passed is tolerably well known already. Returning
home in childhood from India he was put first to a preparatory school,
and afterwards, for nigh seven years, to Charterhouse. At eighteen he
went up to Cambridge, where he spoke in the Union, wrote in university
magazines, criticised Shelley's _Revolt of Islam_, 'a beautiful poem,
though the story is absurd,' and composed a parody on Tennyson's prize
poem, _Timbuctoo_. In 1830 he travelled in Germany, and had his
interview at Weimar with Goethe; and from 1831 we find him settled in
a London pleader's office, reading law with temporary assiduity,
frequenting the theatres and Caves of Harmony, making many literary
acquaintances, taking runs into the country to canvass for Charles
Buller, and trying his 'prentice hand at journalism. His vocation for
literature speedily damped his legal ardour, and drew him out of Mr.
Tapsell's chambers, where he left a desk full of sketches and
caricatures. In May 1832 he wrote: 'This lawyer's preparatory
education is certainly one of the most cold-blooded, prejudicial
pieces of invention that ever a man was slave to;' and he longs for
fresh air and fresh butter. By August he had fled to Paris, where he
read French, worked at a painter's _atelier_, and took seriously to
the work of a newspaper correspondent. On the romantic school, which
was just then at its height, he makes the following remark, which
betrays the antipathy to artificial and theatrical tendencies in
literature that always provoked his satire:
'In the time of Voltaire the heroes of poetry and drama were fine
gentlemen; in the days of Victor Hugo they bluster about in velvet
and mustachios and gold chains, but they seem in nowise more
poetical than their rigid predecessors.'
He had little taste, in fact, for mediaevalism in any shape, and 'old
Montaigne' was more to his liking. We are told, also, that he became
absorbed in Cousin's _Philosophy_, noting upon it that 'the excitement
of metaphysics must equal almost that of gambling'; and finding,
perhaps, no great attraction in either. After his marriage in 1836 he
settled down in London, devoting himself thenceforward to literature
as a profession; the _Yellowplush Papers_, published in 1837 by
_Fraser's Magazine_, being his earliest contribution of any length or
significance. In the introductory chapter Mrs. Ritchie says:
'I hardly know--nor, if I knew, should I care to give here--the
names and the details of the events which suggested some of the
_Yellowplush Papers_. The history of Mr. Deuceace was written from
life during a very early period of my father's career. Nor can one
wonder that his views were somewhat grim at that particular time,
and still bore the impress of an experience lately and very dearly
bought.... As a boy he had lost money at cards to some cardsharpers
who scraped acquaintance with him. He never blinked at the truth or
spared himself; but neither did he blind himself to the real
characters of the people in question, when once he had discovered
them. His villains became curious studies in human nature; he
turned them over in his mind, and he caused Deuceace, Barry Lyndon,
and Ikey Solomons, Esq., to pay back some of their ill-gotten
spoils, in an involuntary but very legitimate fashion, when he put
them into print and made them the heroes of those grim early
histories.'
We may infer from this passage that Thackeray's mind acted not only as
a microscope but as a magnifying glass; he had an eye, as one knows,
for characteristic details, and it appears that he could also enlarge
the small fry of scoundrelism into magnificent rascals. There can be
no doubt that he had the image-making faculty of sensitive genius, and
that much of all he saw and felt went to fill up his canvas and fix
his point of view. Writing to his mother, he once said, 'It is the
fashion to say that people are unfortunate who have lost their money.
Dearest mother, we know better than that;' though 'for years and years
he had to face the great question of daily bread.' But while he could
battle stoutly against losses of this kind, he had no mercy on the
rogues who caused them; and his indignation, accentuated by the strain
of married life on a very narrow income, may account in some degree
for the cynical tone, now sombre, now mocking, which so perceptibly
dominates his earlier writings, and pervades all his books, though in
a lesser and more tolerant way, up to the end. Against this shaded
background, however, we may set many kindly figures, and the contrast
is heightened by the humorous joviality which finds vent in his
talent for caricature. To this we owe the full-length portrait of
Major Gahagan, and a whole gallery of other drawings, usually of
Irishmen, which have been the delight of innumerable readers. The
striking alternation between two extremes of character and conduct,
between tragedy and farce, between ridiculous meanness and pathetic
unselfishness, is to be found in all his novels, though in his later
and finer work it is controlled and tempered to more artistic
proportions. But in the productions of his youth the darker tints so
predominate as to disconcert the judgment of a generation which has
become habituated, at the present day, to a less energetic and
uncompromising style of exposing fools and gibbeting knaves. And after
making due allowance for those indescribable differences of taste
which separate us from our fathers in every region of art--and even
admitting, what is by no means sure, that sixty years ago rascality,
snobbery, and humbug were more rampant in society than nowadays--we
are still disposed to regret that a writer whose best work is
superlatively good should have dwelt so persistently in his earlier
stories upon the dreary and ignoble side of English life. From some
passages in them it might be inferred by foreigners that the better
born Englishmen habitually indulged in rudeness toward their social
inferiors, and that English domestics in good houses broke out into
vulgar insolence whenever they could do so with impunity.
Take, for an example, in the scene from _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_,
the behaviour of Mr. Preston, 'one of her Majesty's Secretaries of
State,' to an underbred but good-tempered little city clerk, whom Lady
Drum takes in her carriage for a drive in Hyde Park, and whom she
hints he might ask to dinner. Mr. Preston acts on the hint, but with
savage sarcasm, and Titmarsh, the clerk, accepts in order to plague
the minister for his astounding rudeness:
'"I did not," he says, "intend to dine with the man, but only to
give him a lesson in manners."'
And so, when the carriage drove up to Mr. Preston's door, he says to
him:
'"When you came up and asked who the devil I was, I thought you
might have put the question in a more polite manner, but it wasn't
my business to speak. When, by way of a joke, you invited me to
dinner, I answered in a joke too, and here I am. But don't be
frightened, I'm not agoing to dine with you."...
'"Is that all, sir?" says Mr. Preston, still in a rage. "If you
have done, will you leave the house, or shall my servants turn you
out? Turn out this fellow; do you hear me?"'
Assuming that sixty years ago a Secretary of State was much the same
sort of man that he is to-day, what are we to think of this spirited
colloquy? and what kind of impression will it, and others no less
forcible, produce upon the future student of manners who turns to
light literature as the mirror of contemporary society?
With regard, again, to the _Yellowplush Papers_, is it from
unpardonable fastidiousness, the affectation of an over-refined
literary taste, that we are inclined to question whether they have
been wisely preserved in standard editions of so great a novelist? The
use of ludicrously distorted spelling intensifies the impression of
ignorant vulgarity, and there is a moral lesson in the story of Mr.
Deuceace that atones in some degree for the very low company whom we
meet in it. But the labour of deciphering the ugly words, and the
cheerless atmosphere of sordid vice and servility which they are most
appropriately used to describe, are so unfamiliar to contemporary
novel-readers that we think few will master two hundred pages of this
dialect in the present edition. On the whole, after renewing our old
acquaintance with Mr. Jeames, with Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon, with
Mr. Stubbs of the Fatal Boots, and others of the same kidney, we doubt
whether these immature character sketches, which all belong to the
author's first and most Hogarthian manner, do not range below the
legitimate boundaries of literature as a fine art, and whether they do
not much rather harm than heighten his permanent reputation when they
are placed on a line with his masterpieces by formal reproduction. It
is impossible to take much interest in personages with an unbroken
record of profligacy and baseness; and we are reminded of the
Aristotelian maxim that pure wickedness is no subject for dramatic
treatment.
Yet we are aware that it may be practically impossible to publish
incomplete editions of a very popular writer; and in the extravagances
of his youth one may discern the promise of much higher things. Very
rapidly, in fact, in the work which comes next, Thackeray rises at
once to a far superior level of artistic performance. We are not
indisposed to endorse the opinion, pronounced more than once by good
judges, that the high-water mark of his peculiar genius was touched by
_Barry Lyndon_, which first exhibits the rare and distinctive
qualities that were completely developed in his later and larger
novels. It may be affirmed, as a general rule, that most of our
eminent writers of fiction have leapt, as Scott did, into the arena
with some work of first-class merit, which has immediately caught
public attention and established their position in literature. Their
fugitive pieces, their crudities and imperfect essays, have been
either judiciously suppressed or consigned to oblivion. They have
followed, one may say, the goodly custom prescribed by the governor
of the Cana marriage feast; they put forth in the beginning their good
wine, and they fall back upon inferior brands only when the public,
having well drunk of the potent vintage, will swallow anything from a
favourite author. We may regret that Thackeray's start as a man of
letters should have furnished an exception to this salutary rule; and
in surveying, after the lapse of many years, his collected works, we
are disposed to observe that no first-class writer has suffered more
from the enduring popularity which has encouraged the republication of
everything that is his, from the finished _chefs-d'oeuvres_ down to
the ephemeral and unripe products of an exuberant youth. He would have
given the world a notable confirmation of the rule that a great author
usually leads off on a high note, if he had opened his munificent
literary entertainment with _Barry Lyndon_. We quote here from Mrs.
Ritchie's introduction:
'My father once said to me when I was a girl, "You needn't read
_Barry Lyndon_; you won't like it." Indeed it is scarcely a book to
_like_, but one to admire and to wonder at for its consummate power
and mastery.... Barry Lyndon tells his own story, so as to enlist
every sympathy against himself, and yet all flows so plausibly, so
glibly, that one can hardly explain how the effect was produced.
From the very first sentence, almost, one receives the impression
of a lawless adventurer, brutal, heartless, with low instincts and
rapid perceptions. Together with his own autobiography, he gives a
picture of the world in which he lives and brags, a picture so
vivid ... that as one reads one almost seems to hear the tread of
remorseless fate sounding through all the din and merriment. Take
those descriptions of the Prussian army during the Seven Years'
War, and of that hand of man which weighs so heavily upon man--what
a haunting page in history!'
These remarks are very justly appreciative, for the book stamps
Thackeray as a fine impressionist, as an artist who skilfully mixes
the colours of reality and imagination into a composition of striking
scenes and the effective portrayal of character. With extraordinary
ability and consistency to the type he works out the gradual evolution
of a wild Irish boy, hot-headed in love and fighting, full of daring
impetuosity and ignorant vanity, into the ruffianly soldier, the
intrepid professional gambler, and finally into the selfish
profligate, who marries a great heiress and sets up as a county
magnate. Instead of the mere unadulterated villainy and meanness which
were impersonated in his previous stories, we have here the complex
strength and weakness of real human nature; we have the whole action
lifted above the platform of city swindlers, insignificant scoundrels,
and needy cardsharpers, up to a stage exhibiting historic personages
and scenes, courts and battlefields; and we breathe freely in the
wider air of immorality on a grand scale. As a sample of spirited
freehand drawing, the sketches of Continental society, 'before that
vulgar Corsican upset the gentry of the world,' are admirable for
their force and originality; and what can be better as a touch of
character than the following defence of his profession by a prince of
gamblers?
'I speak of the good old days of Europe, before the cowardice of
the French aristocracy (in the shameful Revolution, which served
them right) brought ruin on our order.... You call a doctor an
honourable man--a swindling quack, who does not believe in the
nostrums which he prescribes, and takes your guinea for whispering
in your ear that it's a fine morning; and yet, forsooth, a gallant
man who sits him down before the baize and challenges all comers,
his money against theirs, his fortune against theirs, is proscribed
by your modern moral world. It is a conspiracy of the middle
classes against gentlemen; it is only the shopkeeper cant which is
to go down nowadays. I say that play was an institution of
chivalry; it has been wrecked along with other privileges of men of
birth.'
Here we have the romance of the gaming-table; and in the same chapter
Barry Lyndon recounts the evil chance that befell him at cards with
two young students, who had never played before:
'As ill luck would have it, they were tipsy, and against tipsiness
I have often found the best calculations of play fail entirely. A
few officers joined; they played in the most perfectly insane way,
and won always.... And in this ignoble way, in a tavern room thick
with tobacco smoke, across a deal table besmeared with beer and
liquor, and to a parcel of hungry subalterns and beardless
students, three of the most skilful and renowned players in Europe
lost seventeen hundred louis. It was like Charles xii. or Richard
Coeur de Lion falling before a petty fortress and an unknown
hand.'
The picture of gamblers in a grimy tavern, the unconscious humour of
Lyndon's heroic lament, the comparison between the cardsharpers'
discomfiture and the fall of mighty warriors, make up a fine example
of Thackeray's eye for graphic detail, and prove the force and temper
of his incisive irony.
Yet, in spite of its great excellence, the book still labours under
the artistic disadvantage of having a rogue for its hero. Thackeray
was too good an artist to be unconscious of this defect, and in a
footnote to page 215 he defends his choice characteristically. After
admitting that Mr. Lyndon maltreated his lady in every possible way,
bullied her, robbed her to spend the money in gambling and taverns,
kept mistresses in her house, and so on, he argues:
'The world contains scores of such amiable people, and, indeed, it
is because justice has not been done them that we have edited this
autobiography. Had it been that of a mere hero of romance--one of
those heroic youths who figure in the novels of Scott or James,
there would have been no call to introduce the reader to a
personage already so often and so charmingly depicted. Mr. Barry is
not, we repeat, a hero of the common pattern; but let the reader
look round and ask himself, "Do not as many rogues succeed in life
as honest men, more fools than men of talent?" And is it not just
that the lives of this class should be described by the students of
human nature as well as the actions of those fairy-tale princes,
those perfectly impossible heroes,' etc., etc.
One would be almost inclined to infer from this passage that the
author had identified himself so completely with his own creation as
to have become slightly infected with Mr. Barry Lyndon's sophistry;
for it is impossible to maintain seriously that rogues and fools are
no less successful in life than men of honesty and talent. But the
truth is that Thackeray found in a daring rogue a much finer subject
for character-drawing than in the blameless hero, while he was deeply
implicated in the formidable revolt which Carlyle was leading against
the respectabilities of that day.
It is worth notice that in Barry Lyndon's military reminiscences, done
with great vigour and fidelity of detail, we have a very early example
of the realistic as contrasted with the romantic treatment of
campaigns, of life in the bivouac and the barrack. This method, which
has latterly had immense vogue, seems to have been first invented in
France, where Thackeray may have taken the hint from Stendhal; but we
are disposed to believe that he was the first who proclaimed it in
England. As it professes to give the true unvarnished aspect of war it
would certainly have accorded with Thackeray's natural contempt, so
often shown in his writings, for the commonplaces of the military
romancer who revelled in the pomp and circumstance of glorious
battles, the charges, the heroic exploits, the honours, rather than
the horrors, of the fighting business. Moreover, it is not only in
style and treatment but also in sentiment and in certain peculiar
prepossessions, that we can trace in this novel the lines which the
writer followed throughout his narratives, and his favourite
delineations of character. For diplomatists he has always a curious
contempt, and he never misses an opportunity of ridiculing them. 'Mon
Dieu,' says Lyndon, 'what fools they are; what dullards, what
fribbles, what addle-headed coxcombs; this is one of the lies of the
world, this diplomacy'--as if it were not also a most important and
difficult branch of the national services. Abject reverence of great
folk he regarded as the besetting disease of middle-class Englishmen;
and so we find Lyndon remarking, by the way, that Mr. Hunt, Lord
Bullingdon's governor, 'being a college tutor and an Englishman, was
ready to go on his knees to any one who resembled a man of fashion.'
And the kindly cynicism which discoloured Thackeray's ideas about
women, notwithstanding his tender admiration and love for the best of
them, comes out pointedly in old Sir Charles Lyndon's advice to Barry
on the subject of matrimony:
'Get a friend, sir, and that friend a woman, a good household
drudge, who loves you. _That_ is the most precious sort of
friendship, for the expense of it is all on the woman's side. The
man need not contribute anything. If he's a rogue, she'll vow he's
an angel; if he's a brute, she will like him all the better for his
ill-treatment of her. They like it, sir, these women; they are born
to be our greatest comforts and conveniences, our moral boot-jacks,
as it were.'
Barry Lyndon discloses the promise and potency of Thackeray's genius.
In _Vanity Fair_, his next work, it has attained its climax; the
dramatic figures are more finely conceived, the plot is varied and
more skilfully elaborated, the actors more numerous and life-like; and
whereas in his preceding stories he has mainly used the form of a
fictitious memoir, whereby the hero is made to tell his own tale, in
this 'Novel without a Hero' the author proceeds by narration. The tone
is still governed by irony and pathos, wherein Thackeray chiefly
excels; yet the contrasts between weak and strong natures, the
superiority of honesty and the moral sense over craftiness and
unscrupulous cleverness, are now touched off with a lighter and surer
hand. The unmitigated villain and the coarse-tongued hard-hearted
virago have disappeared with other primitive stage properties; the
human comedy is played by men and women of the upper world, with their
virtues and frailties sufficiently set in relief, yet not exaggerated,
for the purposes of the social drama. The book's very title, _Vanity
Fair_, denotes a transition from the scathing satire of his earlier
manner to more indulgent irony, from Swift to Sterne, two authors whom
Thackeray had evidently studied attentively. In his short preface the
author preludes with the gentler note when he invites people of a
lazy, benevolent, or sarcastic mood to step into the puppet show for a
moment and look at the performance.
The book's success, Mrs. Ritchie tells us, was slow; the sale hung
fire. 'One has heard of the journeys which the manuscript made to
various publishers' houses before it could find any one ready to
undertake the venture, and how long its appearance was delayed by
various doubts and hesitations, until it was at last brought out in
its yellow covers by Messrs. Bradbury and Evans on January 1, 1847.'
But when the last numbers were appearing Thackeray wrote that,
'although it does everything but sell, it appears really to increase
my reputation immensely'--as it assuredly did. That a signal success
in literature is nearly always achieved, not by following the beaten
road, but by a bold departure from it, is a principle that could be
abundantly established by examples, and which seems almost a truism
when it is stated. _Vanity Fair_ was decidedly a work of great
freshness and originality; but publishers are circumspect and rarely
adventurous, they distrust novelties and prefer to follow the
prevailing fashion as far as it will go, wherein we may discern one
reason why the accouchement of the first literary child is usually so
laborious.
To criticise at length any single novel of Thackeray's would be far
beyond the scope or purpose of this article. Our object is rather to
illustrate the course and development of his distinctive literary
qualities, the slow effacement of prejudices which never entirely
disappeared, and the rapid expansion of his highest artistic
faculties. To begin with the prejudices. In _Vanity Fair_ he still
makes merciless war upon the poor paltry snob, whom one must suppose
to have infested English society of that day in a very rampant form;
though unless we have had great changes for the better in the last
fifty years, one might suspect exaggeration. And another important
reform of manners must have supervened in the same period if we are to
believe that in these novels the English servant is not unfairly
caricatured. As we know him at the present day, in the class that
lives with gentle-folk, he may be touchy and troublesome, with much
self-assertiveness, but also with much self-respect. He has as many
faults as other people, but among them brutal rudeness is practically
unknown; yet when Rebecca Sharp is driven in Mr. Sedley's carriage to
Sir Pitt Crawley's, having given nothing to the domestics on leaving
the Sedleys, the coachman is ludicrously rude to a poor governess.
'"I shall write to Mr. Sedley, and inform him of your conduct,"
said Miss Sharp to him.
'"Don't," replied that functionary; "I hope you've forgot nothink?
Miss 'Melia's gownds--have you got them--as the lady's maid was to
have 'ad? I hope they'll fit you. Shut the door, Jim, you'll get no
good out of _'er_," continued John, pointing with his thumb towards
Miss Sharp; "a bad lot, I tell you, a bad lot."'
One may conjecture that Thackeray's natural turn for comic burlesque,
which comes out so plainly in his drawings, had become ingrained and
inveterate by early practice, and certainly his immoderate delight in
setting snobs and flunkeys on a pillory became a flaw in the
perfection of his higher composition. It might well produce, among
foreigners at any rate, an unreal impression of the true relations
existing between different classes of English society.
But these are slight blemishes upon the surface of an epoch-making
book, for _Vanity Fair_ inaugurated a new school of novel-writing
in this country, with its combined vigour and subtlety of
character-drawing, and with the marvellous dexterity of its scenes and
dramatic situations. The army and military life in all its phases had
a remarkable attraction for him; in all his larger books one or more
officers are brought prominently upon the foreground of his canvas. He
hits off the strong and weak points of the profession, in war and
peace, with a truth and humour that gave freshness and originality to
the whole subject, and the best of these pictures are in _Vanity
Fair_. There is not one of its leading _militaires_--Dobbin and
Osborne, Crawley and Major O'Dowd--in whom a typical representative of
well-known varieties may not be recognised. His fine picturesque
handiwork, his consistent preference of the real to the romantic, and
his reserve in the use of such tempting materials as the battlefield
affords to the story-teller, are shown in his treatment of the episode
of Waterloo. He is far too good an artist to lay out for us a grand
scene of fierce fighting and carnage; nor does he, like Lever, produce
Wellington and Bonaparte acting or speaking up to the popular
conception of these mighty heroes. He is content to follow his own
personages into that famous field, and to show how perilous
circumstance brings out the force or feebleness of each character,
male and female, whether of the wives left behind at Brussels, or the
soldiers in the fighting line at Waterloo. It is only at the end of
his chapter, after some seriocomic incidents and dialogues exhibiting
the behaviour of the non-combatants--of Jos Sedley, Mrs. O'Dowd, Lady
Bareacres, and the rest--that his narrative rises suddenly to the epic
note in a brief passage full of admirable energy and pathos:
'All our friends took their share and fought like men in the great
field. All day long, whilst the women were praying ten miles away,
the lines of the dauntless English infantry were receiving and
repelling the furious charges of the French horsemen. Guns which
were heard at Brussels were ploughing up their ranks, and comrades
falling, and the resolute survivors closing in. Toward evening the
attack of the French, repeated and resisted so bravely, slackened
in its fury ... they were preparing for a final onset. It came at
last, the columns of the Imperial Guard marched up the hill of St.
Jean.... Unscared by the thunder of the artillery, which hurled
death from the English line, the dark rolling column pressed on and
up the hill. It seemed almost to crest the eminence, when it began
to wave and falter. Then it stopped, still facing the shot. Then at
last the English troops rushed from the post from which no enemy
had been able to dislodge them, and the Guard turned and fled.
'No more firing was heard at Brussels; the pursuit rolled miles
away. Darkness came down on the field and city; and Amelia was
praying for George who was lying on his face, dead, with a bullet
through his heart.'
The military critic might pick holes in this description, and
Thackeray might as well have thrown the English infantry into squares
instead of into line. Yet the passage is instinct with compressed
emotion; and the sudden transition from the general battle to the
single death is a good touch of tragic art.
In _Pendennis_ (1850) we may discern the slowly softening influences
of years that bring the philosophic mind, of a calmer and easier time,
and perhaps also of a different class of readers. Thackeray has now
discovered that, as he says in his preface, 'to describe a real rascal
you must make him too hideous to show;' and that 'Society will not
tolerate the Natural in our Art.' Even the attempt to describe, in
_Pendennis_, one of 'the gentlemen of our age, no better nor worse
than most educated men,' has startled the prudery of the public for
whom he now finds himself writing. 'Many ladies have remonstrated, and
subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described
a young man resisting and affected by temptation.' Here, again, is
another instance of the changes which rules of taste and convention
may undergo in the course of a generation; for surely not even the
straitest middle-class sect would in our day banish _Pendennis_ on the
score of impropriety. Mrs. Ritchie mentions that the author's
descriptions of literary life were criticised on the ground that he
was trying to win favour with the non-literary classes by decrying his
own profession--an absurd accusation which nettled him into replying.
The truth seems to be that Thackeray, who poked fun at the weak sides
of every class and calling, saw no reason why he should leave out his
own; and the men of letters might have been comforted by observing
that he dealt with them much more tenderly than with their natural
enemy the publisher, who has taken philosophically, for all we have
ever heard, the unmerciful caricatures of Bungay and Bacon in
Paternoster Row. Yet it may have been annoying to find such a writer
confidentially whispering to his readers 'that there is no race of
people who talk about books, or perhaps read books, so little as
literary men.'
_Pendennis_ is in Thackeray's best style, as the novelist of manners.
It opens, like _Vanity Fair_, with a short amusing scene that poses,
as the French say, some leading actor in the play, and encourages the
reader to go on. Next follows, as is usual with our author, a short
retrospective account of the people and places among whom the plot is
laid, with a descriptive pedigree of his hero. In his habit of setting
his portraits in a framework of family history (compare the Crawleys,
the Newcomes, the Esmonds) he resembles, though with less prolixity,
Balzac, and he displays much knowledge and observation of English
provincial life. He is, we imagine, the first high-class writer who
brought the Bohemian, possibly an importation from France, into the
English novel; and the contrast between the seedy strolling adventurer
and strait-laced respectability provides him with material for
inexhaustible irony, with much good-natured sympathy for the waifs and
strays. He has always a soft corner in his heart for reckless
hardihood; and every one must be glad that his 'poor friend Colonel
Altamont,' who had been doomed to execution, was respited at the last
moment, as Thackeray tells us in his preface, on the very technical
plea that the author had not sufficient experience of gaol-birds and
the gallows. Merciful good nature toward a daring scamp, who was free
with his money and kind to women, was probably at the bottom of the
condonation. We know from a paper, reproduced (to our thinking
unnecessarily) in one of these volumes, that in 1840 Thackeray went to
see Courvoisier hanged, and was so much upset by the spectacle that he
prayed for the abolition of capital punishment to wipe out its stain
of national blood-guiltiness. It may be noticed, moreover, that his
stern denunciation of crime and folly has by this time settled down
into a philosophic mood that is almost fatalistic, as when he suggests
that 'circumstance only brings out the latent defect or quality, and
does not create it'; that 'our mental changes are, like our grey hairs
and wrinkles, no more than the fulfilment of the plan of mortal growth
and decay,' so that each man is born with the natural seed of fortune
or failure. The voyage of life
'has been prosperous, and you are riding into port, the people
huzzaing and the guns saluting, and the lucky captain bows from the
ship's side, and there is a care under the star on his breast that
nobody knows of; or you are wrecked and lashed, hopeless, to a
solitary spar out at sea; the sinking man and the successful one
are thinking each about home, very likely, and remembering the time
when they were children; alone on the hopeless spar, drowning out
of sight; alone in the midst of the crowd applauding you.'
In such fine passages as these we hear the elegiac strain of the
antique world, wherein remorseless fate held dominion over human
efforts and destiny. Like other great writers who are touched with
humorous melancholy, he falls often into the moralising vein; he stops
his narrative to address his reader with some ironical observation,
after the manner of Fielding, whose leisurely tone of satire is so
audible in the following quotation from _Pendennis_ that he might well
have written it:
'Even his child, his cruel Emily, he would have taken to his heart
and forgiven with tears; and what more can one say of the Christian
charity of a man than that he is actually ready to forgive those
who have done him every kindness, and with whom he is wrong in a
dispute?'
As we have said that _Vanity Fair_ touches the climax of Thackeray's
peculiar genius, so in our judgment _Esmond_ shows the gathered
strength and maturity of his literary power, and has won for him an
eminent place in the distinguished order of historical novelists. We
may say that the art of historical romance was brought to perfection
in our own century, although French writers trace far back into the
eighteenth century, and even further, the method of weaving authentic
events and famous personages into the tissue of a story which turns
upon fictitious adventures in love and war. The elder novelists dealt
largely in extravagant sentiment, in conventional language, and in
marvellous exploits embroidered upon the sober chronicles which served
as the framework of their drama; they were content to set upon stilts
the traditional hero or heroine of former days, whose ideas and
conversation expressed with little disguise the manners, not of the
period to which they belonged, but of the author's own time and of the
society for whom he was writing. These books are, therefore, full of
glaring anachronisms and improbabilities; the knights and dames are
sometimes (as in the _Grand Cyrus_) thinly veiled portraits of
contemporary notabilities, but they are often mere lay figures
representing the prevailing fashions of thought and feeling. The
virtuous hero abounds in judicious reflections; the heroines are
chaste and beauteous damsels--Joan of Arc herself appears in one
romance as an adorable shepherdess--and love-making is conducted after
the model of a Parisian _precieuse_.
It is the opinion of a recent French critic, who has made careful
study of his subject, that the new school was founded by
Chateaubriand, who first, at the last century's end, laid an axe to
the root of all this rhetorical artifice, these frigid and grotesque
incongruities, and filled his romances with local colour, stamping
them with the impress of reality and conformity to nature, by
picturesque reproduction of the landscape, costumes, usages, and
conditions of existence of the time and country in which he might be
unwinding his tale. But Chateaubriand, like Byron (who was of a
similar temperament), never could put himself, to use a French phrase,
into another man's skin; he is to be detected soliloquising and
dispensing noble sentiments under the costume of a Christian martyr or
an American savage, and thus the fidelity of his scene-painting was
still marred by the artificiality of the discourse. It was the
Waverley novel that lifted the historical romance far beyond
Chateaubriand's level, that established it, in England, France, and
Italy on the true principle of creating vivid representations of a
bygone age by a skilful mixture of fact and fiction, and by a correct
and harmonious combination of characters, manners, and environment.
But during the twenty years that intervene between the dates, taken
roughly, of Scott's worst novel and Thackeray's best, the flood tide
of romanticism had risen to its highest point, and had then ebbed very
low, on both sides of the British Channel. And we can see that the
younger writer was no votary of the older school of high-flying
chivalrous romance, with its tournaments, its crusaders, its valiant
warriors, and distressed maidens. His youthful aversion for shams and
conventionalities, his strong propensity toward burlesque and
persiflage, his early life among cities and commonplace folk, seem to
have obscured in some degree his appreciation of even such splendid
compositions as _Ivanhoe_ or _The Talisman_; or, at any rate, his
sense of the ridiculous overpowered his admiration. The result was
that, as Scott had exalted his mediaeval heroes and heroines far above
the level of real life, had revived the legendary age of chivalry and
adventure with all the magnificence of his poetic imagination,
Thackeray had at first set himself, conversely, to strip the trappings
off these fine folk, and to poke his fun at the feudal lords and
ladies by treating them as ordinary middle-class men and women
masquerading in old armour or drapery. He came in as a writer on the
ebb-tide of romanticism, when the reaction showed its popular form in
a curious outburst of the taste for burlesques and parodies on the
stage and in the light reading of the time. Whether the creation of
this taste is to be ascribed to the appearance of two writers with
such genius for wit and fun as Thackeray and Dickens, or whether they
only supplied a natural demand, may be questionable; they undoubtedly
headed the army of Comus, and thereby raised the whole standard of
facetious literature. But the defect of this school was its propensity
to take a hilarious or sardonic view, not only of mediaeval romance,
but of quaint old times generally; and one leading embodiment of this
mocking spirit was _Punch_ founded in 1841. A'Beckett's _Comic History
of England_, which ran through many numbers, seems to this generation
a dreary and deleterious specimen of misplaced farce; though
historically it is not quite such bad work as Dickens's _Child's
History of England_, which he meant to be serious. Among Thackeray's
very numerous contributions to _Punch_ are _Miss Tickletoby's Lectures
on English History_, which might well have been consigned to
oblivion, _Rebecca and Rowena_, and _The Prize Novelists_. The
sarcastic and the sentimental temper must always be hostile to each
other; between romance and ridicule the antipathy is fundamental; and
although one regrets that he ever wrote _Rebecca and Rowena_, the
melodramatic novels of Bulwer-Lytton were fair enough game for the
parodist. However, it is certain that in his earlier writings
Thackeray did much to laugh away the novel of mediaeval chivalry; and
while we think he often carried his irreverent jocosity much too far,
since after all chivalry is better than cockneyism, we may award him
the very high honour of becoming, latterly, one of the founders of a
new and admirable historical school in England.
The eighteenth century was always Thackeray's favourite period; he
liked the rational, unpretentious tone of its best literature, its
practical politics and tolerance, its common sense, and its habit of
keeping very close, in art as in action, to the realities of the world
as we find it. Swift is the most unromantic of any writer that
possessed great imaginative faculty; Defoe was a master of minute
life-like detail, an inimitable imitator of truth; Hogarth's paintings
are like Wesley's or Whitefield's sermons, they are stern, unvarnished
denunciations of vice and profligacy; Fielding was the easy,
large-hearted moralist, who hated above all sins cant and knavery,
loved to banter the parsons, to bring fops and boobies upon his stage,
and to place in contrast the wide difference that then separated
manners in town and in country. Perhaps Thackeray owes more to
Fielding than to any other single literary ancestor; but all these
influences were most congenial to his temperament, and informed his
best work. His instinctive dislike of unreality, exaggeration, and
fanciful ideals would have always prevented him from laying the
situation of his story in some distant age, of which hardly anything
is known accurately, and supplementing his ignorance by giving free
scope to fantastic invention, as was the usage of the humble followers
who tried in vain to conjure with the wand of Scott. He required a
period which he could study, master, and sympathise with, and he found
it in the eighteenth century; though in _Esmond_ the plot, being
founded on Jacobite intrigues and conspiracies, opens with the
Revolution of 1688. He had taken great trouble, as usual, with the
localities, knowing well that you never understand a battle clearly
until you have seen its field.
'"I was pleased to find Blenheim," he wrote to his mother, "was
just exactly the place I had figured to myself, except that the
village is larger; but I fancied I had actually been there, so like
the aspect of it was to what I looked for. I saw the brook which
Harry Esmond crossed, and almost the spot where he fell wounded."'
Mrs. Ritchie quotes this letter as illustrating 'a sort of second
sight as to places which my father used to speak of'; and it certainly
attests his possession of the strong imaginative faculty which puts
together vivid mental pictures.
The first page strikes the note of disenchantment, of escape from the
spell of conventionalism and the shores of romance. Colonel Esmond,
who tells his own tale, wishes the Muse of History to disrobe, to
discard her buskins, and to deliver herself like a woman of the
everyday world.
'I wonder shall History ever pull off her periwig and cease to be
court-ridden? Shall we see something of France and England besides
Versailles and Windsor? I saw Queen Anne tearing down the Park
slopes after her staghounds, in her one-horse chaise--a hot
redfaced woman.... She was neither better bred nor wiser than you
and me, though we knelt to hand her a letter or a washhand basin.
Why shall History go on kneeling to the end of time? I am for
having her rise off her knees, and take her natural posture, not to
be for ever performing cringes and congees like a Court
chamberlain, and shuffling backward out of doors in the presence of
the sovereign. In a word, I would have History familiar rather than
heroic.'
No very deep philosophy in this, we might say, for surely historians
up to Esmond's day had not all been pompous and servile, while
something like dignity is desirable. But here we have Thackeray
speaking through Esmond his own thoughts about history, and
proclaiming the rise of naturalism against the romantic high-heeled
school. And in a much later chapter, where Esmond visits Addison, we
have the true realistic method of Tolstoi and other quite modern
novelists, as compared with the old classic style of describing war.
Addison has been writing a poem on the Blenheim campaign:
'"I admire your art," says Esmond to Addison; "the murder of the
campaign is done to military music, like a battle at the opera, and
the virgins shriek in harmony, as our victorious grenadiers march
into their villages. Do you know what a scene it was? what a
triumph you are celebrating, what scenes of shame and horror were
enacted, over which the commander's genius presided as calm as
though he didn't belong to our sphere? You talk of 'the listening
soldier fixed in sorrow,' the 'leader's grief swayed by generous
pity'; to my belief the leader cared no more for bleating flocks
than he did for infants' cries, and many of our ruffians butchered
one or the other with equal alacrity. You hew out of your polished
verses a stately image of smiling victory; I tell you 'tis an
uncouth, distorted, savage idol, hideous, bloody, and barbarous.
The rites performed before it are shocking to think of. You great
poets should show it as it is, ugly and horrible, not beautiful and
serene."'
When Colonel Esmond has to describe the battles in which he himself
took part, he avoids, as might be supposed, the high romantic style.
But he does not, therefore, fall on the other side, into the mire of
the writers who at the present day conscientiously give us the horrors
of the hospital and all the brutalities of war, which Esmond knows,
but does not choose to set down in his memoir. In his account of the
Blenheim victory there is a skilful touch of the professional soldier,
who records briefly the position of the armies and the tactical
movements; and it lights up with suppressed enthusiasm when he records
the intrepidity of the English regiments in that fierce and famous
struggle. We read of Major-General Wilkes,
'on foot, at the head of the attacking column, marching with his
hat off intrepidly in the face of the enemy, who was pouring in a
tremendous fire from his guns and musketry, to which our people
were instructed not to reply except with pike and bayonet when they
reached the French palisades. To these Wilkes walked intrepidly,
and struck the woodwork with his sword before our people charged
it. He was shot down on the instant, with his colonel, major, and
several officers,'
and the assault was repelled with great slaughter.
In this and other similar passages, you have the historic novelist at
his best; the true facts are selected and arranged so as to form
pictures of soul-stirring action; while their connection with his
story is maintained by giving Esmond himself a very modest and natural
share in the glorious victory:
'And now the conquerors were met by a furious charge of the English
horse under Esmond's general, Lumley, behind whose squadrons the
flying foot took refuge and formed again, while Lumley drove back
the French horse, charging up to the village of Blenheim and the
palisades where Wilkes, and many hundred more gallant Englishmen,
lay in slaughtered heaps. Beyond this moment, and of this famous
victory, Mr. Esmond knows nothing, for a shot brought down his
horse and our young gentleman on it, who fell crushed and stunned
under the animal.'
A lesser artist would have made his hero perform some brilliant
exploit; but Thackeray prefers to sketch the scene as Wouvermans might
have done it. We have not here the incomparable fire and spirit which
Scott throws into the skirmishes at Bothwell Brig and Drumclog; we see
the difference of mind and method; but we can have nothing except
admiration for the rare imaginative faculty which enabled a quiet man
of letters to deal so finely and faithfully, with such reserve and
discrimination, with a subject that might easily have been spoiled by
the noisy clatter and coarse colouring of the inferior artist. His
full length portrait of Marlborough has been too often quoted to be
reproduced here--'impassible before victory, before danger, before
defeat; the splendid calm of his face as he rode along the lines to
battle, or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling
before the enemy's charge or shot.' Of Swift, Esmond says--'I have
always thought of him and of Marlborough as the two greatest men of
that age ... a lonely fallen Prometheus, groaning as the vultures tear
him'; and with a few such strokes he gives etchings of other
celebrities in letters and politics. One may observe with astonishment
that the youthful Thackeray, who delighted in suburban chronicles, in
mean lives and paltry incidents, has risen by middle age to the rank
of an illustrious painter on the broad canvas of history. The annals
of literature contain few, if any, other examples of so remarkable a
transformation.
It is evident that Thackeray, like Scott, was an industrious collector
of material for his novels from all sources; we may refer, for an
instance, to a scene which will have left a passing impression upon
many readers, where, as the French and English armies are facing each
other on two sides of a little stream in the Low Countries, Prince
Charles Edward rides down to the French bank and exchanges a salute
with Esmond. It falls quite naturally and easily into the narrative,
and reads like a very happy original conception; yet the incident,
which is quite authentic, may be found in the papers obtained in the
last century from the Scottish convent at Paris by Macpherson.
In _The Virginians_, which might have had for its second title _Forty
Years Later_, the chronicle of the Esmond family is continued; with
North America during the French war for the battlefields, Braddock,
Wolfe, and Washington for the military figures, and Esmond's grandsons
as the personages round whom the story's interest centres. It is a
novel of very great merit, skilfully constructed, full of vivacious
writing and delineation of character; and the novelist avails himself
with his usual adroitness of the celebrated incidents of this period
and the salient features of English society in the middle of the last
century. Yet we must reluctantly admit that Thackeray has passed his
climacteric, and that as a work of the historical school this book
cannot claim parity with Esmond. George Warrington was on Braddock's
staff at the fatal rout and massacre on the Ohio; his brother Harry
was with Wolfe on the Plains of Abraham; they witnessed a battle lost
and a battle won, and each saw his commander fall. But George's
recital of his hairbreadth escape lacks the stern simplicity with
which his grandfather told the story of Marlborough's wars; and the
device of his being saved from the Indians by a French officer, who
was his intimate friend, is so ingenious as to be a trifle
commonplace. The author does not sketch in any details or personal
adventures from the great fight under the walls of Quebec; he has
fallen back, at this part of the story, into personal narrative, and
_The Warrington Memoirs_ only describe how the news of Wolfe's victory
and death were acclaimed in London. In the War of Independence, George
Warrington, who takes the British side, records the feelings and
situation of an American Loyalist--a class to whom only Mr. Lecky,
amon
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