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?
VI
This leads us naturally to the second “key-secret” which Mr. Merivale found in Thackeray—his Religion. That is all very well, but what do we understand by it? That Thackeray was very simply devout no reader of his novels will question for a moment. Philip, for instance, flings himself quite naturally on his knees in prayer: and, I am sure, quite as naturally did Thackeray in any moment of trouble, as he might be seen religiously walking with his daughters to public worship. But again, what is prayer? or what was it to Thackeray?—forgive me that I raise this question, since religion has been claimed as one of his two “key-secrets.” What is prayer, then? Is it that which, in Jeremy Taylor, “can obtain everything,” can “put a holy constraint upon God, and detain an angel till he leave a blessing ... arrest the sun in the midst of his course and send the swift-wing’d winds upon our errand; and all those strange things, and secret decrees, and unrevealed translations which are above the clouds and far beyond the region of the stars, shall combine in ministry and advantages for the praying man”? Is it with Thackeray so forcible a power as that? Or is it just the humble yet direct petition of the Athenians, commended by Marcus Aurelius—“Rain, rain, dear Zeus, on the ploughed fields of the Athenians”—in truth, says the Emperor, for his part, “we ought not to pray at all, or to pray in this simple and noble fashion.”
There is a considerable difference, you see: and for my part I have, searching Thackeray’s works, no doubt that Thackeray’s prayer was ever direct, devout, unabashed and as simple, as anything in Tom Brown’s School Days transferred to a big grown man. You may at most put him down as a guest at the inn of Emmaus. But he lived through the time of Newman, Manning, Martineau; and all I can say is that if Religion involve any conflict at all of the soul, in his novels I detect nothing of the sort: nothing even resembling those spiritual tortures which, afflicting men so various and differing (if you will) in degree as Newman, Clough, and yet later Richard Jefferies, were a real and dreadful burden of the soul to our fathers and grandfathers. Thackeray lived up to the very thick of the conflict: it touched him not. He was devout just as—shall we say?—we elders have known certain Anglo-Indian Captains who went through the Mutiny and during it saw things upon which, coming home, they locked their lips, gallant gentlemen!
So Thackeray walked and knelt, as it seems to me in the very simplest of Creeds. Its summary is no more—and no less—than old Colonel Newcome’s dying Adsum! Says a reviewer in the North British: