Studies in Literature and History
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,