He used to say, as he may have said on the memorable evening with Burke, “Half the common dishes would supersede turtle and venison, if your old, pampered peers and mighty patricians were to peep and peer into their own cook’s pot.”
CHAPTER VIII.
IMPECUNIOSITY OF AUTHORS.
That memory of William Makepeace Thackeray upon which I care least to dwell is the low estimate he had of men of genius in his own profession. It may be that this was with him, as it was with Doctor Johnson, a species of mock modesty; but it is none the less unpleasant for one to remember who so enthusiastically admires his great works. Men of letters have never lacked more than enough to slander them and magnify their peccadilloes, to sneer at their pride, and lower their social status, without finding such enemies in their own camp. You may remember how, in his lectures on the English humourists of the last century, Thackeray denied that there was any lack of goodwill and kindness towards men of genius in this country, or that they often failed to meet with generous and helping hands in the time of their necessity. Ignoring all but men of one class (whose follies and vices were after all those of their age), and painting these in his darkest colours and most repulsive forms, he asked,—
“What claim had one of these of whom I have been speaking but genius? What return of gratitude, fame, affection, did it not bring to all? What punishment befell those who were unfortunate among them but that which follows reckless habits and careless lives? For these faults a wit must suffer like the dullest prodigal that ever ran in debt. He must pay the tailor if he wears the coat; his children must go in rags if he spends his money at the tavern; he can’t come to London and be made Lord Chancellor if he stops on the road and gambles away his last shilling at Dublin, and he must pay the social penalty of these follies, too, and expect that the world will shun the man of bad habits; that women will avoid the man of loose life; that prudent folks will close their doors as a precaution, and before a demand should be made on their pockets by the needy prodigal.”
There is no gainsaying all this, it is so highly respectable, and I would endorse its application as heartily as those did who once so loudly applauded it, if (and there is, you know, much virtue in an “if”) the discouragement spoken of had really been awarded to the vices and follies and not to the genius; whereas it must be patent to all who have studied the social life of the last century, as Thackeray did, that the direct reverse of this was the case—that such bad habits and such loose lives were absolutely the chief conditions upon which the wits of society were patronised and encouraged. Therefore a degree of hardness and cruelty in the rigid and virtuous superiority of this great writer, who, happily, born in a more refined and purer time, so magnifies the vices of the unfortunate dead, in order to lessen the pity and respect which their greatness won for them. It is this which I do not like to associate with the memory of our great novelist.
Poor, half-starved Robert Burns, chained to the oar of impecuniosity, toiling like a galley-slave, as he said, for the means of supporting his parents and seizing every spare moment for such intellectual improvement as was within his reach, had written most of his finest works before the patronage of the great introduced him to their bacchanalian revels, and carried him as a wonder, and an extraordinary novelty (a peasant poet), into the very best Edinburgh society for a season; during which, by dining out with the noble and great, he ran a serious risk of dying at home through starvation.
It can hardly be said that eighteenth-century patronage and appreciation did much for him, or for us. It won him perhaps the dangerous and trying occupation of exciseman, at a salary of £70 a year: it matured, if it did not absolutely create, the bad habits which plunged him into pecuniary cares and difficulties, weakened his intellectual stamina, and destroyed his self-respect. He was witty, eloquent, amusing, a genius, and a wonder; but when he ceased to be a novelty, the idol of society was ruthlessly cast aside, to live or die, any how he could, and we find him copying music to procure food for himself and those dear to him. Dissipation and trouble carried him off in the prime of his manhood, and the full maturity of his genius, when without such patronage as Thackeray believed in, seemingly, he might have achieved triumphs loftier than those in the full pride of which every patriot has a share.