IV
So we come back to Thackeray, and to preaching. Preaching, or lecturing, would seem to be an endemic itch of our nation, first (I am sure) to be cured through attack on the public propensity for listening to lectures and sermons. You will never cure the lecturer. In my own part of the world the propensity to preach is notoriously virulent. As the song puts it, into the mouth of an enthusiastic emigrant—
And I will be the preacher,
And preach, three times a day,
To every living creature
In North Americay.
For a moment let us go back to Thackeray’s humbugging protest that he wished he were able to write a story with “an incident in every other page, a villain, a battle, a mystery, in every chapter.”
I say (with what reverence it leaves me to command) that this is pure, if unconscious, humbug, and a clouding of truth. For what is an “incident”? A murder—say that of Duncan in the castle of Inverness; a ghost on the battlements of Elsinore, stalking; a horseman in the night, clattering; a ghostly tapping, a detective holding a lantern over a reopened grave—all these are incidents and rather obviously so. But so also, if properly used, may be the tearing-up of a letter, the stiffened drop of a woman’s hands, a sigh, a turning-away.
“Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part”—just that, and if you can use that, what more tragic? Thackeray himself—albeit he could borrow hardily enough from Dumas, as when Colonel Esmond breaks his sword—in that very book achieves his topmost height, his most unchallengeable stroke as an artist, by just telling how a brilliant girl steps down a staircase, and ending on two words, half-whispered in French, at the foot of it—as we shall see, by and by.