Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the Thirty Years’ War.
Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a delirium in excelsis. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding, afterwards learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set, had a brow severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral virtue with just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it rose to a scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it Alpine. Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:
That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has given me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead: we find it somehow or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of Geneva. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has gone to spend its Christmas there.
And later, May 22, 1842:
You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it for Beachy Head.
I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he was in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when I add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed and desolate home—on a home from which his heart drove him to flee, no matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble his novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little closer to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad heart.
V
I must dwell on another point, too. The Thackerays (or Thackwras—which I suppose to be another form of Dockwras) had for some generations prospered and multiplied as Anglo-Indians in the service of the old East India Company. Their tombs are thick in the old graveyard of Calcutta, and I would refer anyone who would ponder their epitaphs, or is interested in the stock from which Thackeray sprang, to a little book by the late Sir William Hunter entitled The Thackerays in India and some Calcutta Graves (Henry Frowde, London: 1897). Thackeray himself was born at Calcutta on the 18th of July, 1811, and, according to the sad fate of Anglo-Indian children, was shipped home to England at the age of five, just as Clive Newcome is shipped home in the novel; and when he pictured the sad figure of Colonel Newcome tottering back up the ghaut, or river-stairs, Thackeray drew what his own boyish eyes had seen and his small heart suffered. Turn to the “Roundabout Paper” On Letts’s Diary and you will read concerning that parting:
I wrote this, remembering in long, long distant days, such a ghaut, or river-stair, at Calcutta, and a day when down those steps, to a boat which was in waiting, came two children, whose mothers remained on the shore. One of those ladies was never to see her boy more.... We were first cousins; had been little playmates and friends from the time of our birth; and the first house in London to which I was taken was that of our aunt, the mother of his Honour the Member of Council.
This young cousin and playmate returned in time, as Thackeray never did, to the shore they were leaving; and died Sir Richmond Shakespeare (no vile nomen!), Agent to the Governor-General for Central India. The news of his death gave occasion to the tender little essay from which I have been quoting.