II
No man can walk abroad save on his own shadow. That is the sentence, of truly Johnsonian common-sense, which bears most intimately on our subject this morning. The story runs that Thackeray, one day tapping impatiently upon the cover of some adulatory memoir of somebody, warm from the press, enjoined upon his family, “None of this nonsense about me, after my death”: and the injunction was construed by his daughter, Lady Ritchie, most piously beyond a doubt, perhaps too strictly, for certain not with the happiest results. For this denial of any authoritative biography—of a writer and a clean-living English gentleman who might, if any human being can or could, have walked up to the Recording Angel and claimed his dossier without a blush—has not only let in a flood of spurious reminiscences, anecdotes, sayings he most likely never uttered or at least never uttered with meaning or accent to give pain that, as reported, they convey. It has led to a number of editions with gossipy prefaces and filial chat (I fear I must say it) none the more helpful for being tinctured by affection and qualified by reserve.
This happens to be the more unfortunate of Thackeray since, as I suppose, no writer of the Victorian age walked abroad more sturdily on his own tall shadow, or trusted more on it. It was a shadow, too: dark enough for any man’s footstep. I do not wish—nor is it necessary—to break in upon any reticence. But you probably know the main outline of the story—of a Cambridge youth, of Trinity, who living moderately beyond his means (as undergraduates will) lost his affluence, lost the remains of it when, bolting to London, he dared to run a newspaper—two newspapers. The National Standard had soon (in his own phrase) to be hauled down, and The Constitutional belied its title by a rapid decline and decease. Thus he lost a moderate patrimony, and we find him next as a roving journalist in Paris, divided between pen and pencil, with an almost empty pocket. There, in August, 1836, at the British Embassy, he made a most imprudent but happy marriage—most happy, that is for a while. Years afterwards he wrote to a young friend:
I married at your age with £400 paid by a newspaper which failed six months afterwards, and always love to hear of a young man testing his fortune in that way. Though my marriage was a wreck, as you know, I would do it over again, for behold Love is the crown and completion of all earthly good.... The very best and pleasantest house I ever knew in my life had but £300 to keep it.
Here, then, comes in the tragedy of Thackeray’s life. Daughters were born to him amid those pleasures and anxieties which only they can taste fully who earn their daily bread in mutual love on the future’s chance. As he beautifully wrote, long after, in Philip:
I hope, friend, you and I are not too proud to ask for our daily bread, and to be grateful for getting it? Mr. Philip had to work for his, in care and trouble, like other children of men:—to work for it, and I hope to pray for it too. It is a thought to me awful and beautiful, that of the daily prayer, and of the myriads of fellow-men uttering it, in care and in sickness, in doubt and in poverty, in health and in wealth. Panem nostrum da nobis hodie. Philip whispers it by the bedside where wife and child lie sleeping, and goes to his early labour with a stouter heart: as he creeps to his rest when the day’s labour is over, and the quotidian bread is earned, and breathes his hushed thanks to the bountiful Giver of the meal. All over this world what an endless chorus is singing of love, and thanks, and prayer. Day tells to day the wondrous story, and night recounts it unto night. How do I come to think of a sunrise which I saw near twenty years ago on the Nile when the river and sky flushed with the dawning light and, as the luminary appeared, the boatmen knelt on the rosey deck and adored Allah? So, as thy sun rises, friend, over the humble housetops round about your home, shall you wake many and many a day to duty and labour. May the task have been honestly done when the night comes; and the steward deal kindly with the labourer.
Always this refrain in Thackeray—the text which Dr. Johnson once had inscribed on his watch, ΝΥΞ ΓΑΡ ΕΡΧΕΤΑΙ, “For the night cometh.”
With the birth of her third child, however, Mrs. Thackeray fell under a mental disease not violent at first, but deepening until it imperatively required removal and restraint.