Studies in Literature and History
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,
among historians, has done fair justice. There is much acute and
well-informed reflection upon the state of the colonies at this time,
the strong currents of party politics, and the exasperation which
brought about the rebellion; but, on the whole, this part of the
narrative has too much resemblance to real history. It has not enough
of the imaginative and picturesque element to lift it above the
comparatively prosaic level of an interesting memoir, though some good
scenes and situations are obtained by making the two Warrington
brothers take opposite sides. When we learn that, in 1759, the English
Lord Castlewood repaired his shattered fortunes by marrying an
American heiress, we are inclined to suspect that our author has taken
a hint from the fashion of a century later.
In the story of _Esmond_ Thackeray dropped the satirical tone, and
indulged very rarely indeed in the habit of pausing to moralise, as
writer to reader, upon social hypocrisy, servile obsequiousness, and
whited sepulchres generally. In _The Virginians_ he is less attentive
to dramatic propriety; he begins again to turn aside and lecture us,
in the midst of his tale, upon the text of _De te fabula narratur_.