III
I have been as short over this as could be: but the simple fact must be taken into account if we would understand Thackeray at all. Without knowledge of it, for instance, how can we interpret the ache behind his jolly Ballad of Bouillabaisse?
This Bouillabaisse a noble dish is—
A sort of soup, or broth, or brew,
Or hotchpotch, of all sorts of fishes,
That Greenwich never could outdo;
Green herbs, red peppers, mussels, saffern,
Soles, onions, garlic, roach, and dace;
All these you eat at Terré’s tavern,
In that one dish of Bouillabaisse...
Ah me! how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a day that’s gone,
When here I’d sit, as now I’m sitting,
In this same place—but not alone.
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to cheer me
—There’s no one now to share my cup.
If you wish, taking him at his best, to envisage Thackeray in the days of his assured triumph, you must understand him as a desolated man; as a man who, having built a fine house for himself in Kensington Palace Gardens, could never fit it for a real home. If he built himself a house, he could not sit and write in it; scarcely a page of The Newcomes was written but on Club paper or at a hotel. It would seem as if the very anguish of the hearth drove this soul, so domestic by instinct, into the waste of Club-land, Pall Mall, the Reform Club, where his portrait now so pathetically hangs. For above all (let The Rose and the Ring with its delightful and delicate occasion attest) Thackeray was born to be beloved of a nursery—the sort of great fellow to whom on entrance every child, as every dog, takes by instinct. In the nursery, quite at home, he rattles off the gayest unforgettable verses:
Did you ever hear of Miss Symons?
She lives at a two-penny pieman’s:
But when she goes out
To a ball or a rout
Her stomacher’s all covered with di’monds.
Or, for elder taste,
In the romantic little town of Highbury,
My father kept a Succulating Libary.
He followed in his youth the Man immortal who
Conquered the Frenchman on the plains of Waterloo
—with similar fooling. Some men at Cambridge had the gift of this fooling—in Tennyson’s day, too—and not the least of them was Edward Lear, incomparable melodist of nonsense—nursery Mozart of the Magic Flute—to whom, on his Travels in Greece, Tennyson dedicated those very lovely stanzas beginning:
Illyrian woodlands, echoing falls
Of water, sheets of summer glass,
The long divine Peneian pass,
The vast Acroceraunian walls....
He must be an unsympathetic critic (I think) and therefore an incomplete critic, if indeed a critic at all, who feels any real incongruity as in his mind he lets those lines fade off into
Far and few, far and few,
Are the lands where the Jumblies live, etc.;
for as Shelley once assured us, more or less:
Many a green isle needs must be
In the deep wide sea of—Philistie,
and to anyone who remembers the imaginary horizons of his nursery I dare say the Blessed Isles of Nonsense and the land where the Bong tree grows lie not far from Calypso’s grot, or the house of Circe
In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,
Where that Æaean isle forgets the main....
or the yellow sands of Prospero’s island where the elves curtsy, kiss and dance, or Sindbad’s cave, or those others “measureless to man” rushed through by Alph the sacred river to where we
see the children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.