V
But (say the critics) he was disappointed, soured because—conscious of his powers of “superior” education and certain gifts only to be acquired through education, he felt that Dickens—whom certain foolish people chose to talk of endlessly as his rival—was all the time outstripping him in public favour. Now, as for this, I cannot see how Thackeray, in any wildest dream, could have hoped to catch up with Dickens and pass him in popularity. To begin with, he came to fruition much later than Dickens: in comparison with the precocity of Pickwick Thackeray was in fact thirty-seven before he hit the target’s gold with Vanity Fair. His earlier serious efforts—Catherine, Barry Lyndon, The Book of Snobs—are sour and green stuff, call them what else you will. They deal with acrid characters and (what is more) deal with them acridly. But even supposing them to be masterpieces (which title to two of the three I should certainly deny) where was the audience in comparison with that to which Dickens appealed? Where, outside a few miles’ radius of Club-land, did men and women exist in any numbers to whom Thackeray’s earlier work could, by any possibility, appeal? The dear and maiden lady in Cranford, Miss Jenkyns, as you remember, made allowances for Pickwick in comparison with Dr. Johnson’s Rasselas. “Still perhaps the author is young. Let him persevere, and who knows what he may become, if he will take the Great Doctor for his model.” But what—what on earth would she have made of Barry Lyndon? And what would good Captain Brown himself have made of it? I can almost better see the pair, on the sly, consenting to admire Tristram Shandy.
Now Dickens and Thackeray were both thin-skinned men in their sensitiveness to public approbation. On at least one occasion each made a fool of himself by magnifying a petty personal annoyance into an affair of the world’s concern. As if anybody mattered to that extent!—
Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta
Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.
But in literary London there are always (I regret to say) busybodies who will estrange great men if they can; and, the cause of quarrel once set up, I still more regret to say that the great men quite as often as not come most foolishly out of it. Thackeray’s estrangement from Dickens happened over an article by a young journalist of twenty-seven—Mr. Edmund Yates, afterwards Editor of The World, a society newspaper—and Thackeray’s foolish insistence, in the teeth of remonstrances by Dickens and Wilkie Collins, that young Yates should be expelled from the Garrick Club. A week before Thackeray’s death, he and Dickens met on the steps of the Athenæum, passed, turned, and looked at each other. Thackeray held out a hand, which Dickens did not refuse.
Now may I put in here, Gentlemen, and in parenthesis, a word of which I have often wanted to unburden myself?... Some of you—some of the best of you, I hope—may leave Cambridge for Fleet Street, a street which I too have trodden. It is a street of ambitions; but withal the centre of our English Republic of Letters, in the motto of which, though there can be no “Equality,” let us neither exclude the “Liberty” that Milton fought for, nor the “Fraternity” of elder and younger brethren. I remember this plea for Fraternity being put up by an eminent man of letters, still with us; and being so much impressed by it that it outlasted even the week-after-next, when I found him taking off the gloves to punish a rival scribe. But these two were musical critics, arguing about music: and I have sometimes, pondering, thought that there must really be something naturally akin between music and prosody (arts of which I know so little), seeing that the professors of both pelt each other in terms of insult so amazingly similar and with a ferocity the likeness of which one has to recognise even while murmuring, “Come, come! What is this all about, after all?” I suppose the average Musical Review in the weekly papers to contain more mud to the square inch than even The Dunciad! And you must acknowledge, Gentlemen, The Dunciad, for all its wit, to be on the whole a pretty wearisome heap of bad breeding. It kicks: but as they say in the country, there is “plenty hair on the hoof.” What I plead is that all we engaged in literature take some warning from the discourtesies of the past, and that you, at any rate, who pass out into literary practice from this Tripos of ours, shall pass out as a confraternity of gentlemen. Consider, if you will, that Literature, our mistress, is a goddess greater than any of us. She is Shakespeare and Ben Jonson too; Milton and Dry den; Swift, Addison, Steele; Berkeley and Goldsmith; Pope and John Gay; Johnson, Gibbon, Burke, Sheridan; Cowper and Burns; Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge; Landor, Scott, Keats, Shelley and Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Browning, all, says the Preacher, “giving counsel by their understanding and declaring prophecies.” I name but a few of the procession, but all were her knights; and each, in his time, fought for his ideal of her—
Blue is Our Lady’s colour,
White is Our Lord’s:
Tomorrow I will make a knot
Of blue and white cords;
That you may see it where I ride
Among the flashing swords.
Or let me lower the key and put it thus—addressing you as plain apprentices and setting the ground no higher than an appeal for the credit of our craft. I once wrote of Robert Louis Stevenson, and with truth, that he never seemed to care who did a good piece of work so long as a good piece of work got itself done. Consider, on top of this, the amount of loss to the world’s benefit through those literary broils and squabbles. You are expected, for example, to know something, at least, of The Dunciad in your reading for the English Tripos: and I dare say many of you have admired its matchless conclusion:
Lo! thy dread empire CHAOS is restor’d:
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch, lets the curtain fall.
But turn your admiration about and consider what a hand capable of writing so might have achieved in the long time it had wasted, turning over an immense buck-basket of foul linen. No, Gentlemen—take the example of poor Hazlitt—contemporary misunderstandings, heart-burnings, bickerings make poor material for great authors. I cannot find that, although once, twice or thrice, led astray into these pitfalls, Thackeray (and this is the touchstone) ever really envied another man’s success.
“Get David Copperfield,” he writes in a familiar letter: “by jingo, it’s beautiful; it beats the yellow chap (Pendennis) of this month hollow.”
And again, “Have you read Dickens? Oh, it’s charming. Bravo Dickens! it (David Copperfield again) has some of his very prettiest touches—those inimitable Dickens’ touches which make such a great man of him.”
In truth there was in this tall fellow of six-feet-four a strain of melancholy not seldom observable in giants.[2] Add to this that touch of inherited Anglo-Indian melancholy of which I spoke a fortnight ago; add the tragedy of his marriage; and I think we need not seek amid any literary disappointments for the well of the song of “Vanity, vanity, all is vanity” which, springing evident in the title of his first great novel, runs an undercurrent through all that he wrote.
[2] He was remarkable for height and bulk: a lumbering, unathletic figure with a slouch. One day being at a fair with his friend “Big Higgins” (Jacob Omnium) they approached a booth and Higgins felt in his pockets for small change. “Oh!” said Thackeray, “they’ll pass us in free, as two of the profession.”
It was not for nothing that he translated Uhland’s
The King on the Tower
The cold grey hills they bind me around,
The darksome valleys lie sleeping below,
But the winds as they pass o’er all this ground,
Bring me never a sound of woe!
Oh! for all I have suffered and striven,
Care has embittered my cup and my feast;
But here is the night and the dark blue heaven,
And my soul shall be at rest.
O golden legends writ in the skies!
I turn towards you with longing soul,
And list to the awful harmonies
Of the Spheres as on they roll.
My hair is grey and my sight nigh gone;
My sword it rusteth upon the wall;
Right have I spoken, and right have I done:
When shall I rest me once for all?
O blessed rest! O royal night!
Wherefore seemeth the time so long
Till I see yon stars in their fullest light,
And list to their loudest song?