VI
But now we come to the man’s style; by which I mean, of course, his propriety and grace of writing. It is, as we have seen, a “flowing” style: it has that amplitude which Longinus commended and our Burke practised, as an attribute of the sublime. For defect, as a narrative style, it tells in three or more pages what might as well be told in three sentences and often better. Without insisting that the writers of the ’nineties (of whom I spoke but now) ever managed to justify their painful search for the briefest, most telling phrase, I submit that it is unlikeliest to be found by a man writing against time, for monthly numbers. That (if you will) being granted, we have to ask ourselves why Thackeray’s prose is so beautiful that it moves one so frequently to envy, and not seldom to a pure delight, transcending all envy. For certain the secret lies nowhere in his grammar, in which anyone can find flaws by the score. Half the time his sentences run as if (to borrow a simile of Mr. Max Beerbohm’s concerning Shakespeare’s A Midsummer-Night’s Dream) the man were kicking up a bedroom slipper and catching it again on his toe. The secret lies, if you will follow his sentences and surrender yourselves to their run and lull and lapse, in a curious haunting music, as of a stream; a music of which scarce any other writer of English prose has quite the natural, effortless, command. You have no need to search in his best pages, or to hunt for his purple patches. It has a knack of making music even while you are judging his matter to be poor stuff; music—and frequent music—in his most casual light-running sentences. I protest, Gentlemen, I am not one of your pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt fellows: I grudge no man saying a thing of mine before me, even when I know it must be valuable because the anticipator is Mr. George Saintsbury; and so far am I from wishing him to perish that one of my sustaining hopes of life is that of congratulating him on his hundredth birthday. (Do not be afraid: in any event, it shall not be from this desk.) But I protest also that in his History of English Prose Rhythm he surprised a secret which was mine, and shy as love—the conviction that for mastery—unconscious, native mastery, it may be—of “that other rhythm of prose”—no English writer excels Thackeray, and a very few indeed approach him. So you guess that I have to deal at once with a sense of gratitude and a grudge that my secret can now stand expressed and confirmed by so high an authority: and my grudge I shall work off by quoting him.
“When I say,” he affirms, “that I hardly know any master of English prose-rhythm greater, in his way, than Thackeray, and that I certainly do not know any one with so various and pervasive a command, I may seem to provoke the answer, ‘Oh! you are, if not a maniac, at any rate a maniaque.’ Nevertheless, I say it; and will maintain it. The most remarkable thing about Thackeray is his mastery of that mixed style, ‘shot with rhythm.’ Even in his earliest and most grotesque extravaganzas you will rarely find a discordant sentence—the very vulgarisms and misspellings come like solecisms from a pair of pretty lips and are uttered in a musical voice. As there never was a much hastier writer, it is clear that the man thought in rhythm—that the words, as they flowed from his pen, brought the harmony with them. Even his blank verse and his couplets in prose, never, I think, in any one instance unintentional, but deliberately used for burlesque purposes, have a diabolical quality and, as the wine merchants say, ‘breed’ about them, which some very respectable ‘poets’ have never achieved.”
He quotes a short beautiful passage from Vanity Fair—
She was wrapped in a white morning dress, her hair falling on her shoulders and her large eyes fixed and without light. By way of helping on the preparations for the departure [for Waterloo where let me remind you he, her husband, was to fall and lie, with a bullet through his heart], and showing that she too could be useful at a moment so critical, this poor soul had taken up a sash of George’s, from the drawers whereon it lay and followed him to and fro, with the sash in her hand, looking on mutely as the packing proceeded. She came out and stood leaning at the wall, holding this sash against her bosom, from which the heavy net of crimson dropped like a large stain of blood.
He proceeds:
Take another and shorter—not, I hope, impudently short “Becky was always good to him, always amused, never angry.”
Anybody can do that? Perhaps; but please find something like it for me before 1845, and out of Thackeray, if you will kindly do so. In him it is everywhere.
But, for the cadence of it—since all true prose demands prolonged cadences—let me try to read you a passage or two from the exquisite sixth and seventh chapters of Esmond. Harry Esmond is home from his campaigning, has been to service in the old cathedral, and meets his dear mistress outside as the service is done and over. Mark, I say, the cadences of that scene of reconciliation—
She gave him her hand, her little fair hand: there was only her marriage ring on it. The quarrel was all over. The year of grief and estrangement was passed. They never had been separated. His mistress had never been out of his mind all that time. No, not once. No, not in the prison; nor in the camp; nor on shore before the enemy; nor at sea under the stars of solemn midnight; nor as he watched the glorious rising of the dawn: not even at the table, where he sat carousing with friends, or at the theatre yonder, where he tried to fancy that other eyes were brighter than hers. Brighter eyes there might be, and faces more beautiful, but none so dear—no voice so sweet as that of his beloved mistress, who had been sister, mother, goddess to him during his youth—goddess now no more, for he knew of her weaknesses; and by thought, by suffering, and that experience it brings, was older now than she; but more fondly cherished as woman perhaps than ever she had been adored as divinity. What is it? Where lies it? the secret which makes one little hand the dearest of all? Who ever can unriddle that mystery? Here she was, her son by his side, his dear boy. Here she was, weeping and happy. She took his hand in both hers; he felt her tears. It was a rapture of reconciliation.
They walked as though they had never been parted, slowly, with the grey twilight closing round them.
“And now we are drawing near to home,” she continued, “I knew you would come, Harry, if—if it was but to forgive me for having spoken unjustly to you after that horrid—horrid misfortune. I was half frantic with grief then when I saw you. And I know now—they have told me. That wretch, whose name I can never mention, even has said it: how you tried to avert the quarrel, and would have taken it on yourself, my poor child: but it was God’s will that I should be punished, and that my dear lord should fall.”
“He gave me his blessing on his death-bed,” Esmond said. “Thank God for that legacy!”
“Amen, amen! dear Henry,” said the lady, pressing his arm. “I knew it. Mr. Atterbury, of St. Bride’s, who was called to him, told me so. And I thanked God, too, and in my prayers ever since remembered it.”
“You had spared me many a bitter night, had you told me sooner,” Mr. Esmond said.
“I know it, I know it,” she answered, in a tone of such sweet humility, as made Esmond repent that he should ever have dared to reproach her. “I know how wicked my heart has been; and I have suffered too, my dear. I confessed to Mr. Atterbury—I must not tell any more. He—I said I would not write to you or go to you—and it was better even that, having parted, we should part. But I knew you would come back—I own that. That is no one’s fault. And to-day, Henry, in the anthem, when they sang it, ‘When the Lord turned the captivity of Zion, we were like them that dream,’ I thought yes, like them that dream—them that dream. And then it went, ‘They that sow in tears shall reap in joy; and he that goeth forth and weepeth, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him;’ I looked up from the book and saw you. I was not surprised when I saw you. I knew you would come, my dear, and saw the gold sunshine round your head.”
She smiled an almost wild smile as she looked up at him. The moon was up by this time, glittering keen in the frosty sky. He could see for the first time now clearly, her sweet careworn face.
“Do you know what day it is?” she continued. “It is the 29th of December—it is your birthday! But last year we did not drink it—no, no. My lord was cold, and my Harry was likely to die: and my brain was in a fever; and we had no wine. But now—now you are come again, bringing your sheaves with you, my dear.” She burst into a wild flood of weeping as she spoke: she laughed and sobbed on the young man’s heart, crying out wildly, “bringing your sheaves with you—your sheaves with you!”
So they fare to the lit house, and to the tragedy which is the tragedy of all womankind; of beauty fading while desire endures, the passion to be loved persists; most tragic of all when a mother meets in a daughter her careless conquering rival.
As they came up to the house at Walcote, the windows from within were lighted up with friendly welcome; the supper-table was spread in the oak parlour; it seemed as if forgiveness and love were awaiting the returning prodigal. Two or three familiar faces of domestics were on the look-out at the porch—the old housekeeper was there, and young Lockwood from Castlewood, in my lord’s livery of tawny and blue. His dear mistress pressed his arm as they passed into the hall. Her eyes beamed out on him with affection indescribable. “Welcome,” was all she said, as she looked up, putting back her fair curls and black hood. A sweet rosy smile blushed on her face; Harry thought he had never seen her look so charming. Her face was lighted with a joy that was brighter than beauty—she took a hand of her son, who was in the hall waiting his mother—she did not quit Esmond’s arm.
“Welcome, Harry!” my young lord echoed after her. “Here we are all come to say so. Here’s old Pincot: hasn’t she grown handsome?” and Pincot, who was older, and no handsomer than usual, made a curtsey to the Captain, as she called Esmond, and told my lord to “Have done, now.”
“And here’s Jack Lockwood. He’ll make a famous grenadier, Jack; and so shall I; we’ll both ’list under you, Cousin. As soon as I am seventeen, I go to the army—every gentleman goes to the army. Look! who comes here—ho, ho!” he burst into a laugh. “’Tis Mistress Trix, with a new ribbon; I knew she would put one on as soon as she heard a captain was coming to supper.”
This laughing colloquy took place in the hall of Walcote House, in the midst of which is a staircase that leads from an open gallery, where are the doors of the sleeping chambers: and from one of these, a wax candle in her hand, and illuminating her, came Mistress Beatrix—the light falling indeed upon the scarlet ribbon which she wore, and upon the most brilliant white neck in the world.
Esmond had left a child and found a woman, grown beyond the common height, and arrived at such a dazzling completeness of beauty, that his eyes might well show surprise and delight at beholding her. In hers there was a brightness so lustrous and melting, that I have seen a whole assembly follow her as if by an attraction irresistible: and that night the great Duke was at the playhouse after Ramillies, every soul turned and looked (she chanced to enter at the opposite side of the theatre at the same moment) at her, and not at him. She was a brown beauty: that is, her eyes, hair and eyebrows and eye-lashes were dark: her hair curling with rich undulations, and waving over her shoulders; but her complexion was as dazzling white as snow in sunshine; except her cheeks, which were a bright red, and her lips, which were of a still deeper crimson. Her mouth and chin, they said, were too large and full, and so they might be for a goddess in marble, but not for a woman whose eyes were fire, whose look was love, whose voice was the sweetest low song, whose shape was perfect symmetry, health, decision, activity, whose foot as it planted itself on the ground was firm but flexible, and whose motion, whether rapid or slow, was always perfect grace—agile as a nymph, lofty as a queen—now melting, now imperious, now sarcastic—there was no single movement of hers but was beautiful. As he thinks of her, he who writes feels young again, and remembers a paragon.
So she came holding her dress with one fair rounded arm, and her taper before her, tripping down the stair to greet Esmond.
“She hath put on her scarlet stockings and white shoes,” says my lord, still laughing. “Oh, my fine mistress! is this the way you set your cap at the Captain?” She approached, shining smiles upon Esmond, who could look at nothing but her eyes. She advanced holding forward her head, as if she would have him kiss her as he used to do when she was a child.
“Stop,” she said, “I am grown too big! Welcome, Cousin Harry,” and she made him an arch curtsey, sweeping down to the ground almost, with the most gracious bend, looking up the while with the brightest eyes and sweetest smile. Love seemed to radiate from her. Harry eyed her with such a rapture as the first lover is described as having by Milton.
“N’est-ce pas?” says my lady, in a low, sweet voice, still hanging on his arm.
Esmond turned round with a start and a blush, as he met his mistress’s clear eyes. He had forgotten her, rapt in admiration of the filia pulcrior.
I have said some hard things, Gentlemen, upon Thackeray and have indicated some dislike of him here and there, or, at least, some impatience. But to the man who could at once so poignantly and so reticently bring those two scenes into contrast—with all its meaning—all meaning—modulated to so perfect a balance of heart and intelligence wedded in human speech—well, to that man I conclude by bowing the head, acknowledging a real master: a great melancholy man with his genius running in streaks, often in thin streaks about him but always, when uttered, uttered in liquid lovely prose.