“‘I think the angels are not all in heaven,’ Mr. Esmond said. And as a brother folds a sister to his heart; and as a mother cleaves to her son’s breast—so for a few moments Esmond’s beloved mistress came to him and blessed him.”
After this wonderful chapter there comes another of almost equal beauty, if it stood alone, but the two together make a strange discord. For when they reach Walcote, which is now the family home, Beatrix, the daughter of Lady Castlewood, comes down the stairs to greet him.
“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 theater at the same moment) at her, and not at him. She was a brown beauty—that is, her eyes, hair, and eyebrows and eyelashes 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.”
Esmond falls instantly in love with the dazzling beauty, and the rest of the book, down to nearly the end of the last chapter, has for its theme his fruitless devotion to this brilliant, volatile, imperious, and capricious girl, and her mother’s sympathy with him in his vain suit!
He again betakes himself to the army to win a rank and a name so as to lay them at her feet. He takes part in the great campaigns of Marlborough in Flanders—at Donauwörth, Blenheim, Ramillies, Oudenarde, Wynendael, Malplaquet. He is wounded at Blenheim, and again (near the close of the war) at Mons, and he is promoted until he reaches the rank of colonel. He returns to England from time to time, meets the brilliant girl (now maid of honor to the Queen) to whom his life is devoted, only to have his heart torn by her coldness and her caprices. Once for a moment she relents, but the mood passes and she pursues her schemes of ambition. First she is betrothed to Lord Ashburnham, then to the Duke of Hamilton, and when that nobleman falls in a duel with Lord Mohun, it is Esmond who has to bring her the news of this crushing blow to her ambition.
And now he will attempt one brilliant feat to win her. Queen Anne is near her end. Esmond will bring back to England the Pretender, the exiled King (to whose cause the family are deeply devoted) to take the vacant throne. Here follow the details of this scheme, and a description of the king’s dissolute and fickle character. He is brought to the house of Lady Castlewood, where he shows too plainly his fancy for Beatrix, who on her part is far too compliant. She is sent away to Castlewood, and becomes furious at the suspicions of her family. When the plot of the king’s friends is ripe the Pretender can not be found. A letter from Beatrix informing him that she is a prisoner is intercepted, and Esmond and her brother Frank ride all night to Castlewood, where they find the young king, and although they are in time to save her honor, yet this crowning infidelity has crushed out the last spark of Esmond’s love. On their return to London the Queen is dead and George is proclaimed King.
Let the concluding scenes of the story be told in Esmond’s own words:
“Ever after that day at Castlewood, when we rescued her, she persisted in holding all her family as her enemies, and left us, and escaped to France, to what a fate I disdain to tell. Nor was her son’s house a home for my dear mistress; my poor Frank was weak, as perhaps all our race hath been, and led by women.... ’Twas after a scene of ignoble quarrel on the part of Frank’s wife and mother (for the poor lad had been made to marry the whole of that German family with whom he had connected himself) that I found my mistress one day in tears, and then besought her to confide herself to the care and devotion of one who by God’s help would never forsake her. And then the tender matron, as beautiful in her autumn, and as pure as virgins in their spring, with blushes of love and eyes of meek surrender yielded to my respectful importunity, and consented to share my home.”
If Esmond had shot himself, or turned monk, or spent his last days alone, or lived with Lady Castlewood as her son, the artistic harmony of the book would have been preserved, but to marry one who had been in the place of a mother to him all these years—Faugh! not even the genius of Thackeray can make such a match attractive. This dreadful anticlimax mars what would otherwise be beyond all question (and what may be still in spite of it) the most beautiful work of fiction ever written.
Thackeray knows better than any other novelist, except perhaps Cervantes, how to describe a gentleman. That peculiar aggregation of qualities so unmistakable, yet so elusive of definition, which go to make up this character, appear more clearly in his novels than anywhere else in English fiction. Henry Esmond, Colonel Newcome and Major Dobbin are almost as perfect examples of this as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance himself. And Thackeray (in another work) thus speaks to us of gentlemen: