I
I fear, Gentlemen, that you will have to take my earlier remarks to-day with some sympathy for your lecturer’s time of life, even though you refuse that respect for greying hairs which I shall never claim of you. If you hereafter remember at all, you will remember that never from this desk was preached anything but confidence in you, never a word to bind you with any old or middle-aged rules of wisdom. “Earth loves her young,” says Meredith:
Her gabbling grey she eyes askant, nor treads
The ways they walk, by what they speak oppressed
—which is well and hopeful and in the way of nature. But since Professors do not come by nature you have to forgive them a certain maturity, a date, a crust in the bottle, and handle them gently if you would know the vintage.
I shall ask you, then, to discount what follows in apparent depreciation of Thackeray: to remind yourselves that we are all too prone to destroy the age just preceding our own; with something of that primitive instinct which (they say), translated into legislation amid the South Seas, commands a grandfather to scale a tree and hold on, if he can, while his prehensile young sway the trunk and jerk it. I do not myself believe in these rude communal tests, that they ever were, or indeed that, even in our time, natural science has arrived, for instance, at any fixable limit for a Professor’s incapacity—and tenacity.
I am simply stating a plain historical fact when I say that the men who were young and practised writing in the later days of Queen Victoria—and as devotedly as any of you can be practising it to-day—found their most peculiar, most dearly cherished, anathema in the “preachiness” of the mid-Victorian novelists—of which “preachiness” Thackeray had been perhaps the most eminent practitioner and exemplar. He confesses it, indeed, in one of the Roundabout Papers. Says he:
Perhaps of all the novel-spinners now extant, the present speaker is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop perpetually in his story and begin to preach to you? When he ought to be engaged with business, is he not for ever taking the Muse by the sleeve, and plaguing her with one of his cynical sermons? I cry peccavi loudly and heartily. I tell you I would like to be able to write a story which should show no egotism whatever, in which there should be no reflections, no cynicism, no vulgarity (and so forth) but an incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.