What happens? The domestic servant question (always with us), cold rooms, dinner-parties at which stories about Allahabad are listened to patiently by ladies who confuse it with Lahore, polite men who suggest a game of “snooker pool” as a relief, hoping for not too many anecdotes in the course of it. And for this your friend and his admirable wife have been nursing, feeding themselves on promise for, maybe, thirty years and more, all the time and day after day—there lies the tragedy—dutifully giving all their best, for England, in confidence of its reward.
It is not altogether our fault. It is certainly not our fault that the partridges do not rise on the stubble or the salmon leap up and over the dams in such numbers as the repatriated fondly remember. To advise a lady accustomed to many Indian servants upon tact with a couple or three of English ones—post-War too—is (as Sir Thomas Browne might say) to bid her sleep in Epicurus his faith, and reacclimatise her notion. But, to be short, they talk to us politics which have no basis discoverable in this country.
Yet, withal, they are so noble! So simple in dignity! Far astray from any path of progress as we may think him; insane as we may deem his demand to rule, unreasonable his lament over the lost England of his youth which for so long he has sentimentalised, or domestic his interest in his nephews, the Anglo-Indian has that key of salvation which is loyalty. He is for England: and for that single cause I suppose no men or women that ever lived and suffered on earth have suffered more than those who lie now under the huddled gravestones of Calcutta.
VII
I am coming to this: that those who accuse Thackeray of being a snob (even under his own definition) should in fairness lay their account that he came of people who, commanding many servants, supported the English tradition of rule and dominance in a foreign land.
I believe this to explain him in greater measure than he has generally been explained or understood. Into a class so limited, so exiled, so professional in its aims and interests—so borné and repugnant against ideas that would invade upon the tried order of things and upset caste along with routine—so loyal to its own tradition of service, so dependent for all reward upon official recognition (which often means the personal caprice of some Governor or Secretary of State or Head of Department), some Snobbery—as we understand the word nowadays—will pretty certainly creep; to make its presence felt, if not to pervade. But I am not going to discuss with you the question, “Was Thackeray that thing he spent so much pains, such excessive pains, in denouncing?”—over which so many disputants have lost their tempers. It is not worth our while, as the whole business, to my thinking, was not worth Thackeray’s while. When we come to it—as we must, because it bulks so largely in his work—we shall quickly pass on.
To me it seems that Thackeray’s geniture and early upbringing—all those first impressions indelible in any artist—affected him in subtler ways far better worth our considering. Let me just indicate two.
VIII
For the first.—It seems to me that Thackeray—a social delineator or nothing—never quite understood the roots of English life or of the classes he chose to depict; those roots which even in Pall Mall or Piccadilly or the Houses of Parliament ramify underground deep and out, fetching their vital sap from the countryside. Walter Bagehot, after quoting from Venus and Adonis Shakespeare’s famous lines on a driven hare, observes that “it is absurd to say we know nothing about the man who wrote that: we know he had been after a hare.” I cannot find evidence in his works that this child, brought from Calcutta to Chiswick, transferred to the Charterhouse (then by Smithfield), to Cambridge, Paris, Fleet Street, Club-land, had ever been after a hare: and if you object that this means nothing, I retort that it means a great deal: it means that he never “got off the pavement.” It means that he is on sure ground when he writes of Jos. Sedley, demi-nabob, but on no sure ground at all when he gets down to Queen’s Crawley: that in depicting a class—now perhaps vanishing—he never, for example, got near the spirit that breathes in Archdeacon Grantly’s talk with his gamekeeper:
“I do think, I do indeed, sir, that Mr. Thorne’s man ain’t dealing fairly along of the foxes. I wouldn’t say a word about it, only that Mr. Henry is so particular.”