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13 January, 2012
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Letters To Dead Authors
LETTER--To W. M. Thackeray
by Lang, Andrew
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Sir,--There are many things that stand in the way of the critic when
he has a mind to praise the living. He may dread the charge of
writing rather to vex a rival than to exalt the subject of his
applause. He shuns the appearance of seeking the favour of the
famous, and would not willingly be regarded as one of the many
parasites who now advertise each movement and action of contemporary
genius. "Such and such men of letters are passing their summer
holidays in the Val d'Aosta," or the Mountains of the Moon, or the
Suliman Range, as it may happen. So reports our literary "Court
Circular," and all our Precieuses read the tidings with enthusiasm.
Lastly, if the critic be quite new to the world of letters, he may
superfluously fear to vex a poet or a novelist by the abundance of
his eulogy. No such doubts perplex us when, with all our hearts, we
would commend the departed; for they have passed almost beyond the
reach even of envy; and to those pale cheeks of theirs no
commendation can bring the red.
You, above all others, were and remain without a rival in your many-
sided excellence, and praise of you strikes at none of those who
have survived your day. The increase of time only mellows your
renown, and each year that passes and brings you no successor does
but sharpen the keenness of our sense of loss. In what other
novelist, since Scott was worn down by the burden of a forlorn
endeavour, and died for honour's sake, has the world found so many
of the fairest gifts combined? If we may not call you a poet (for
the first of English writers of light verse did not seek that
crown), who that was less than a poet ever saw life with a glance so
keen as yours, so steady, and so sane? Your pathos was never cheap,
your laughter never forced; your sigh was never the pulpit trick of
the preacher. Your funny people--your Costigans and Fokers--were
not mere characters of trick and catch-word, were not empty comic
masks. Behind each the human heart was beating; and ever and again
we were allowed to see the features of the man.
Thus fiction in your hands was not simply a profession, like
another, but a constant reflection of the whole surface of life: a
repeated echo of its laughter and its complaint. Others have
written, and not written badly, with the stolid professional
regularity of the clerk at his desk; you, like the Scholar Gipsy,
might have said that "it needs heaven-sent moments for this skill."
There are, it will not surprise you, some honourable women and a few
men who call you a cynic; who speak of "the withered world of
Thackerayan satire;" who think your eyes were ever turned to the
sordid aspects of life--to the mother-in-law who threatens to "take
away her silver bread-basket;" to the intriguer, the sneak, the
termagant; to the Beckys, and Barnes Newcomes, and Mrs. Mackenzies
of this world. The quarrel of these sentimentalists is really with
life, not with you; they might as wisely blame Monsieur Buffon
because there are snakes in his Natural History. Had you not
impaled certain noxious human insects, you would have better pleased
Mr. Ruskin; had you confined yourself to such performances, you
would have been more dear to the Neo-Balzacian school in fiction.
You are accused of never having drawn a good woman who was not a
doll, but the ladies that bring this charge seldom remind us either
of Lady Castlewood or of Theo or Hetty Lambert. The best women can
pardon you Becky Sharp and Blanche Amory; they find it harder to
forgive you Emmy Sedley and Helen Pendennis. Yet what man does not
know in his heart that the best women--God bless them--lean, in
their characters, either to the sweet passiveness of Emmy or to the
sensitive and jealous affections of Helen? 'Tis Heaven, not you,
that made them so; and they are easily pardoned, both for being a
very little lower than the angels and for their gentle ambition to
be painted, as by Guido or Guercino, with wings and harps and
haloes. So ladies have occasionally seen their own faces in the
glass of fancy, and, thus inspired, have drawn Romola and Consuelo.
Yet when these fair idealists, Mdme. Sand and George Eliot, designed
Rosamund Vincy and Horace, was there not a spice of malice in the
portraits which we miss in your least favourable studies?
That the creator of Colonel Newcome and of Henry Esmond was a
snarling cynic; that he who designed Rachel Esmond could not draw a
good woman: these are the chief charges (all indifferent now to
you, who were once so sensitive) that your admirers have to contend
against. A French critic, M. Taine, also protests that you do
preach too much. Did any author but yourself so frequently break
the thread (seldom a strong thread) of his plot to converse with his
reader and moralise his tale, we also might be offended. But who
that loves Montaigne and Pascal, who that likes the wise trifling of
the one and can bear with the melancholy of the other, but prefers
your preaching to another's playing!
Your thoughts come in, like the intervention of the Greek Chorus, as
an ornament and source of fresh delight. Like the songs of the
Chorus, they bid us pause a moment over the wider laws and actions
of human fate and human life, and we turn from your persons to
yourself, and again from yourself to your persons, as from the odes
of Sophocles or Aristophanes to the action of their characters on
the stage. Nor, to my taste, does the mere music and melancholy
dignity of your style in these passages of meditation fall far below
the highest efforts of poetry. I remember that scene where Clive,
at Barnes Newcome's Lecture on the Poetry of the Affections, sees
Ethel who is lost to him. "And the past and its dear histories, and
youth and its hopes and passions, and tones and looks for ever
echoing in the heart and present in the memory--these, no doubt,
poor Clive saw and heard as he looked across the great gulf of time,
and parting and grief, and beheld the woman he had loved for many
years."
FOR EVER ECHOING IN THE HEART AND PRESENT IN THE MEMORY: who has
not heard these tones, who does not hear them as he turns over your
books that, for so many years, have been his companions and
comforters? We have been young and old, we have been sad and merry
with you, we have listened to the mid-night chimes with Pen and
Warrington, have stood with you beside the death-bed, have mourned
at that yet more awful funeral of lost love, and with you have
prayed in the inmost chapel sacred to our old and immortal
affections, e leal souvenir! And whenever you speak for yourself,
and speak in earnest, how magical, how rare, how lonely in our
literature is the beauty of your sentences! "I can't express the
charm of them" (so you write of George Sand; so we may write of
you): "they seem to me like the sound of country bells, provoking I
don't know what vein of music and meditation, and falling sweetly
and sadly on the ear." Surely that style, so fresh, so rich, so
full of surprises--that style which stamps as classical your
fragments of slang, and perpetually astonishes and delights--would
alone give immortality to an author, even had he little to say. But
you, with your whole wide world of fops and fools, of good women and
brave men, of honest absurdities and cheery adventurers: you who
created the Steynes and Newcomes, the Beckys and Blanches, Captain
Costigan and F. B., and the Chevalier Strong--all that host of
friends imperishable--you must survive with Shakespeare and
Cervantes in the memory and affection of men.
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