Essays in Little Part 8

Well, it has arrived, though we are none the happier for all that. The Fas.h.i.+onable Novel has ceased to exist, and the place of the fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess knows her no more. Thackeray plainly detested Lady f.a.n.n.y. He writes about her, her books, her critics, her successes, with a certain bitterness. Can it be possible that a world which rather neglected _Barry Lyndon_ was devoted to _Marchionesses and Milliners_? Lady f.a.n.n.y is represented as having editors and reviewers at her feet; she sits among the flowers, like the Sirens, and around her are the bones of critics corrupt in death. She is puffed for the sake of her bouquets, her dinners, her affabilities and condescensions. She gives a reviewer a great garnet pin, adorned wherewith he paces the town. Her adorers compare her to "him who sleeps by Avon." In one of Mr. Black's novels there is a lady of this kind, who captivates the tribe of "Log Rollers,"

as Mr. Black calls them. This lady appears to myself to be a quite impossible She. One has never met her with her wiles, nor come across her track, even, and seen the bodies and the bones of those who perished in puffing her. Some persons of rank and fas.h.i.+on have a taste for the society of some men of letters, but nothing in the way of literary puffery seems to come of it. Of course many critics like to give their friends and acquaintances an applausive hand, and among their acquaintances may be ladies of fas.h.i.+on who write novels; but we read nowhere such extraordinary adulations as Augustus Timson bestowed on Lady f.a.n.n.y. The fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess is nearly extinct, though some persons write well albeit they are fas.h.i.+onable. The fas.h.i.+onable novel is as dead as a door nail: _Lothair_ was nearly the last of the species. There are novelists who write about "Society," to be sure, like Mr. Norris; but their tone is quite different. They do not speak as if Dukes and Earls were some strange superior kind of beings; their manner is that of men accustomed to and undazzled by Earls, writing for readers who do not care whether the hero is a lord or a commoner. They are "at ease," though not terribly "in Zion." Thackeray himself introduces plenty of the peerage, but it cannot be said that he is always at ease in their society. He remembers that they are lords, and is on his guard, very often, and suspicious and sarcastic, except, perhaps when he deals with a gentleman like Lord Kew. He examines them like curious wild animals in the Jardin des Plantes. He is an accomplished naturalist, and not afraid of the lion; but he remembers that the animal is royal, and has a t.i.tle. Mr.

Norris, for instance, shows nothing of this mood. Mr. Trollope was not afraid of his Dukes: he thought none the worse of a man because he was the high and puissant prince of Omnium. As for most novelists, they no longer paint fas.h.i.+onable society with enthusiasm. Mr. Henry James has remarked that young British peers favour the word "beastly,"--a point which does not always impress itself into other people so keenly as into Mr. Henry James. In reading him you do not forget that his Tufts are Tufts. But then Tufts are really strange animals to the denizens of the Great Republic. Perhaps the modern realism has made novelists desert the world where Dukes and Dowagers abound. Novelists do not know very much about it; they are not wont to haunt the gilded saloons, and they prefer to write about the manners which they know. A very good novel, in these strange ruinous times, might be written with a Duke for hero; but n.o.body writes it, and, if anybody did write it in the modern manner, it would not in the least resemble the old fas.h.i.+onable novel.

Here a curious point arises. We have all studied the ingenious lady who calls herself Ouida. Now, is Ouida, or rather was Ouida in her early state sublime, the last of the old fas.h.i.+onable novelists, or did Thackeray unconsciously prophesy of her when he wrote his burlesque _Lords and Liveries_? Think of the young earl of Bagnigge, "who was never heard to admire anything except a _coulis de dindonneau a la St.

Menehould_, . . . or the bouquet of a flask of Medoc, of Carbonnell's best quality, or a _goutte_ of Marasquin, from the cellars of Briggs and Hobson." We have met such young patricians in _Under Two Flags_ and _Idalia_. But then there is a difference: Ouida never tells us that her hero was "blest with a mother of excellent principles, who had imbued his young mind with that morality which is so superior to all the vain pomps of the world." But a hero of Ouida's might easily have had a father who "was struck down by the side of the gallant Collingwood in the Bay of Fundy." The heroes themselves may have "looked at the Pyramids without awe, at the Alps without reverence." They do say "_Corpo di Bacco_," and the Duca de Montepulciano does reply, "_E' bellissima certamente_." And their creator might conceivably remark "Non cuivis contigit." But Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery's ladies could not dress as Ouida's ladies do: they could not quote Petronius Arbiter; they had never heard of Suetonius. No age reproduces itself. There is much of our old fas.h.i.+onable auth.o.r.ess in Ouida's earlier tales; there is plenty of the Peerage, plenty of queer French in old novels and Latin yet more queer; but where is the _elan_ which takes archaeology with a rush, which sticks at no adventure, however n.o.bly incredible? where is the pathos, the simplicity, the purple splendour of Ouida's manner, or manners? No, the spirit of the world, mirroring itself in the minds of individuals, simpered, and that simper was Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery. But it did many things more portentous than simpering, when it reflected itself in Ouida.

Is it that we do no longer gape on the aristocracy admiringly, and write of them curiously, as if they were creatures in a Paradise? Is it that Thackeray has converted us? In part, surely, we are just as sn.o.bbish as ever, though the G.o.ds of our adoration totter to their fall, and "a hideous hum" from the mob outside thrills through the temples. In fiction, on the other hand, the world of fas.h.i.+on is "played out." n.o.body cares to read or write about the dear d.u.c.h.ess. If a peer comes into a novel he comes in, not as a coroneted curiosity, but as a man, just as if he were a dentist, or a stockbroker. His rank is an accident; it used to be the essence of his luminous apparition. I scarce remember a lord in all the many works of Mr. Besant, nor do they people the romances of Mr.

Black. Mr. Kipling does not deal in them, nor Mr. George Meredith much; Mr. Haggard hardly gets beyond a baronet, and _he_ wears chain mail in Central Africa, and tools with an axe. Mrs. Oliphant has a Scotch peer, but he is less interesting and prominent than his family ghost. No, we have only Ouida left, and Mr. Norris--who writes about people of fas.h.i.+on, indeed, but who has nothing in him of the old fas.h.i.+onable novelist.

Is it to a Republic, to France, that we must look for our fas.h.i.+onable novels--to France and to America. Every third person in M. Guy de Maupa.s.sant's tales has a "de," and is a Marquis or a Vicomte. As for M.

Paul Bourget, one really can be happy with him in the fearless old fas.h.i.+on. With him we meet Lord Henry Bohun, and M. De Casal (a Vicomte), and all the Marquises and _Marquises_; and all the pale blue boudoirs, and sentimental d.u.c.h.esses, whose hearts are only too good, and who get into the most complicated amorous sc.r.a.pes. That young Republican, M.

Bourget, sincerely loves a _blason_, a pedigree, diamonds, lace, silver dressing cases, silver baths, essences, pomatums, _le grand luxe_. So does Gyp: apart from her wit, Gyp is delightful to read, introducing us to the very best of bad company. Even M. Fortune du Boisgobey likes a Vicomte, and is partial to the _n.o.blesse_, while M. Georges Ohnet is accused of entering the golden world of rank, like a man without a wedding garment, and of being lost and at sea among his aristocrats. They order these things better in France: they still appeal to the fine old natural taste for rank and luxury, splendour and refinement. What is Gyp but a Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery _reussie_,--Lady f.a.n.n.y with the trifling additional qualities of wit and daring? Observe her n.o.ble scorn of M.

George Ohnet: it is a fas.h.i.+onable arrogance.

To my mind, I confess, the decay of the British fas.h.i.+onable novel seems one of the most threatening signs of the times. Even in France inst.i.tutions are much more permanent than here. In France they have fas.h.i.+onable novels, and very good novels too: no man of sense will deny that they are far better than our dilettantism of the slums, or our religious and social tracts in the disguise of romance. If there is no new tale of treasure and bandits and fights and lions handy, may I have a fas.h.i.+onable novel in French to fall back upon! Even Count Tolstoi does not disdain the _genre_. There is some uncommonly high life in _Anna Karenine_. He adds a great deal of psychology, to be sure; so does M.

Paul Bourget. But he takes you among smart people, who have everything handsome about them--t.i.tles, and lands, and rents. Is it not a hard thing that an honest British sn.o.b, if he wants to move in the highest circles of fiction, must turn to French novelists, or Russian, or American? As to the American novels of the _elite_ and the _beau monde_, their elegance is obscured to English eyes, because that which makes one New Yorker better than another, that which creates the Upper Ten Thousand (dear phrase!) of New York, is so inconspicuous. For example, the scientific inquirer may venture himself among the novels of two young American authors. Few English students make this voyage of exploration.

But the romances of these ingenious writers are really, or really try to be, a kind of fas.h.i.+onable novels. It is a queer domain of fas.h.i.+on, to be sure, peopled by the strangest aborigines, who talk and are talked about in a language most interesting to the philologist. Here poor Lady f.a.n.n.y Flummery would have been sadly to seek, for her characters, though n.o.ble, were moral, and her pen was wielded on the side of Church and State. But these western fas.h.i.+onables have morals and a lingo of their own, made in equal parts of the American idioms and of expressions transferred from the jargon of Decadence and the _Parna.s.siculet Contemporain_. As one peruses these novels one thinks of a new tale to be told--_The Last of the Fas.h.i.+onables_, who died away, like the buffalo and the grisly bear, in some canon or forest of the Wild West. I think this distinguished being, _Ultimus hominum venustiorum_, will find the last remnants of the Gentlemanly Party in some Indian tribe, Apaches or Sioux. I see him raised to the rank of chief, and leading the red-skinned and painted cavaliers on the war-path against the Vulgarians of the ultimate Democracy. To depict this dandy chief would require the art at once of a Cooper and a Ouida. Let me attempt--

THE LAST FIGHT OF FOUR HAIR-BRUSHES

By this time the Sioux were flying in all directions, mowed down by the fire of Gatling and Maxim guns. The scrub of Little Big Horn Creek was strewn with the bodies of writhing braves. On the livid and volcanic heights of Mount Buncombe, the painted tents were blazing merrily. But on a mound above the creek, an ancient fortress of some long-forgotten people, a small group of Indian hors.e.m.e.n, might be observed, steady as rocks in the refluent tide of war. The fire from their Winchester repeaters blazed out like the streamers of the Northern Lights. Again and again the flower of the United States army had charged up the mound, only to recoil in flight, or to line the cliff with their corpses. The First Irish Cuira.s.siers had been annihilated: Parnell's own, alas! in the heat of the combat had turned their fratricidal black-thorns on M'Carthy's brigade, and these two gallant squadrons were mixed and broken, falling beneath the blows of brothers estranged.

But at last the fire from the Redmen on the bluff slackened and grew silent. The ammunition was exhausted. There was a movement in the group of braves. Crazy Horse and Bald Coyote turned to Four Hair-Brushes, who sat his steed Atalanta, last winner of the last Grand National, with all the old careless elegance of the Row.

"Four Hair-Brushes," said Crazy Horse (and a tear rolled down his painted cheek), "nought is left but flight."

"Then fly," said Four Hair-Brushes, languidly, lighting a cigarette, which he took from a diamond-studded gold _etui_, the gift of the Kaiser in old days.

"Nay, not without the White Chief," said Bald Coyote; and he seized the reins of Four Hair-Brushes, to lead him from that stricken field.

"Vous etes trop vieux jeu, mon ami," murmured Four Hair-Brushes, "je ne suis ni Edouard II., ni Charles Edouard a Culloden. Quatre-brosses meurt, mais il ne se rend pas."

The Indian released his hold, baffled by the erudition and the calm courage of his captain.

"I make tracks," he said; and, swinging round so that his horse concealed his body, he galloped down the bluff, and through the American cavalry, scattering death from the arrows which he loosed under his horse's neck.

Four Hair-Brushes was alone.

Unarmed, as ever, he sat, save for the hunting-whip in his right hand.

"Scalp him!" yelled the Friendly Crows.

"Nay, take him alive: a seemlier knight never backed steed!" cried the gallant Americans.

From their midst rode a courteous cavalier, Captain John Barry, the scholar, the hero of sword and pen.

"Yield thee, Sir Knight!" he said, doffing his _kepi_ in martial courtesy.

Four Hair-Brushes replied to his salute, and was opening his curved and delicate lips to speak, when a chance bullet struck him full in the breast. He threw up his arms, reeled, and fell. The gallant American, leaping from saddle to ground, rushed to raise his head.

Through the war-paint he recognised him.

"Great Heaven!" he cried, "it is--"

"Hus.h.!.+" whispered Four Hair-Brushes, with a weary smile: "let Annesley de Vere of the Blues die unnamed. Tell them that I fell in harness."

He did, indeed. Under his feathered and painted cloak Barry found that Annesley, ever careful of his figure, ever loyal in love, the last of the Dandies, yet wore the corset of Madame de Telliere. It was wet with his life-blood.

"So dies," said Barry, "the last English gentleman."

THACKERAY

"I thought how some people's towering intellects and splendid cultivated geniuses rise upon simple, beautiful foundations hidden out of sight."

Thus, in his Letters to Mrs. Brookfield, Mr. Thackeray wrote, after visiting the crypt of Canterbury Cathedral, with its "charming, harmonious, powerful combination of arches and shafts, beautiful whichever way you see them developed, like a fine music." The simile applies to his own character and genius, to his own and perhaps to that of most great authors, whose works are our pleasure and comfort in this troublesome world. There are critics who profess a desire to hear nothing, or as little as may be, of the lives of great artists, whether their instrument of art was the pen, or the brush, or the chisel, or the strings and reeds of music. With those critics perhaps most of us agree, when we read books that gossip about Sh.e.l.ley, or Coleridge, or Byron.

"Give us their poetry," we say, "and leave their characters alone: we do not want tattle about Claire and chatter about Harriet; we want to be happy with 'The Skylark' or 'The Cloud.'" Possibly this instinct is correct, where such a poet as Sh.e.l.ley is concerned, whose life, like his poetry, was as "the life of winds and tides," whose genius, unlike the skylark's, was more true to the point of heaven than the point of home.

But reflection shows us that on the whole, as Mr. Thackeray says, a man's genius must be builded on the foundations of his character. Where that genius deals with the mingled stuff of human life--sorrow, desire, love, hatred, kindness, meanness--then the foundation of character is especially important. People are sometimes glad that we know so little of Shakespeare the man; yet who can doubt that a true revelation of his character would be not less worthy, n.o.ble and charming than the general effect of his poems? In him, it is certain, we should always find an example of n.o.bility, of generosity, of charity and kindness and self-forgetfulness. Indeed, we find these qualities, as a rule, in the biographies of the great sympathetic poets and men of genius of the pen--I do not say in the lives of rebels of genius, "meteoric poets" like Byron.

The same basis, the same foundations of rect.i.tude, of honour, of goodness, of melancholy, and of mirth, underlie the art of Moliere, of Scott, of Fielding, and as his correspondence shows, of Thackeray.

It seems probable that a complete biography of Thackeray will never be written. It was his wish to live in his works alone: that wish his descendants respect; and we must probably regard the Letters to Mr. and Mrs. Brookfield as the last private and authentic record of the man which will be given, at least to this generation. In these Letters all sympathetic readers will find the man they have long known from his writings--the man with a heart so tender that the world often drove him back into a bitterness of opposition, into an a.s.sumed hardness and defensive cynicism. There are readers so unluckily const.i.tuted that they can see nothing in Thackeray but this bitterness, this cruel sense of meanness and power of a.n.a.lysing shabby emotions, sneaking vanities, contemptible ambitions. All of us must often feel with regret that he allowed himself to be made too unhappy by the spectacle of failings so common in the world he knew best, that he dwelt on them too long and lashed them too complacently. One hopes never to read "Lovel the Widower" again, and one gladly skips some of the speeches of the Old Campaigner in "The Newcomes." They are terrible, but not more terrible than life. Yet it is hard to understand how Mr. Ruskin, for example, can let such scenes and characters hide from his view the kindness, gentleness, and pity of Thackeray's nature. The Letters must open all eyes that are not wilfully closed, and should at last overcome every prejudice.

In the Letters we see a man literally hungering and thirsting after affection, after love--a man cut off by a cruel stroke of fate from his natural solace, from the centre of a home.

"G.o.d took from me a lady dear,"

he says, in the most touching medley of doggerel and poetry, made "instead of writing my _Punch_ this morning." Losing "a lady dear," he takes refuge as he may, he finds comfort as he can, in all the affections within his reach, in the society of an old college friend and of his wife, in the love of all children, beginning with his own; in a generous liking for all good work and for all good fellows.

Did any man of letters except Scott ever write of his rivals as Thackeray wrote of d.i.c.kens? Artists are a jealous race. "Potter hates potter, and poet hates poet," as Hesiod said so long ago. This jealousy is not mere envy, it is really a strong sense of how things ought to be done, in any art, touched with a natural preference for a man's own way of doing them.

Now, what could be more unlike than the "ways" of d.i.c.kens and Thackeray?

The subjects chosen by these great authors are not more diverse than their styles. Thackeray writes like a scholar, not in the narrow sense, but rather as a student and a master of all the refinements and resources of language. d.i.c.kens copies the chaff of the street, or he roams into melodramatics, "drops into poetry"--blank verse at least--and touches all with peculiarities, we might say mannerisms, of his own. I have often thought, and even tried to act on the thought, that some amusing imaginary letters might be written, from characters of d.i.c.kens about characters of Thackeray, from characters of Thackeray about characters of d.i.c.kens. They might be supposed to meet each other in society, and describe each other. Can you not fancy Captain Costigan on d.i.c.k Swiveller, Blanche Amory on Agnes, Pen on David Copperfield, and that "tiger" Steerforth? What would the family solicitor of "The Newcomes"

have to say of Mr. Tulkinghorn? How would George Warrington appreciate Mr. Pickwick? Yes, the two great novelists were as opposed as two men could be--in manner, in style, in knowledge of books, and of the world.

And yet how admirably Thackeray writes about d.i.c.kens, in his letters as in his books! How he delights in him! How manly is that emulation which enables an author to see all the points in his rival, and not to carp at them, but to praise, and be stimulated to keener effort!

Consider this pa.s.sage. "Have you read d.i.c.kens? O! it is charming! Brave d.i.c.kens! It has some of his very prettiest touches--those inimitable d.i.c.kens touches which make such a great man of him, and the reading of the book has done another author a great deal of good."

Thackeray is just as generous, and perhaps more critical, in writing of Kingsley. "A fine, honest, go-a-head fellow, who charges a subject heartily, impetuously, with the greatest courage and simplicity; but with narrow eyes (his are extraordinarily brave, blue and honest), and with little knowledge of the world, I think. But he is superior to us worldlings in many ways, and I wish I had some of his honest pluck."

I have often wished that great authors, when their days of creation were over, when "their minds grow grey and bald," would condescend to tell us the history of their books. Sir Walter Scott did something of this kind in the prefaces to the last edition of the Waverley Novels published during his life. What can be more interesting than his account, in the introduction to the "Fortunes of Nigel," of how he worked, how he planned, and found all his plots and plans overridden by the demon at the end of his pen! But Sir Walter was failing when he began those literary confessions; good as they are, he came to them too late. Yet these are not confessions which an author can make early. The pagan Aztecs only confessed once in a lifetime--in old age, when they had fewer temptations to fall to their old loves: then they made a clean breast of it once for all. So it might be with an author. While he is in his creative vigour, we want to hear about his fancied persons, about Pendennis, Beatrix, Becky, not about himself, and how he invented them. But when he has pa.s.sed his best, then it is he who becomes of interest; it is about himself that we wish him to speak, as far as he modestly may. Who would not give "Lovel the Widower" and "Philip" for some autobiographical and literary prefaces to the older novels? They need not have been more egotistic than the "Roundabout Papers." They would have had far more charm. Some things cannot be confessed. We do not ask who was the original Sir Pitt Crawley, or the original Blanche Amory. But we might learn in what mood, in what circ.u.mstances the author wrote this pa.s.sage or that.

The Letters contain a few notes of this kind, a few literary confessions.

We hear that Emmy Sedley was partly suggested by Mrs. Brookfield, partly by Thackeray's mother, much by his own wife. There scarce seems room for so many elements in Emmy's personality. For some reason ladies love her not, nor do men adore her. I have been her faithful knight ever since I was ten years old and read "Vanity Fair" somewhat stealthily. Why does one like her except because she is such a thorough woman? She is not clever, she is not very beautiful, she is unhappy, and she can be jealous. One pities her, and that is akin to a more tender sentiment; one pities her while she sits in the corner, and Becky's green eyes flatter her oaf of a husband; one pities her in the poverty of her father's house, in the famous battle over Daffy's Elixir, in the separation from the younger George. You begin to wish some great joy to come to her: it does not come unalloyed; you know that Dobbin had bad quarters of an hour with this lady, and had to disguise a little of his tenderness for his own daughter. Yes, Emmy is more complex than she seems, and perhaps it needed three ladies to contribute the various elements of her person and her character. One of them, the jealous one, lent a touch to Helen Pendennis, to Laura, to Lady Castlewood. Probably this may be the reason why some persons dislike Thackeray so. His very best women are not angels. {109} Are the very best women angels? It is a pious opinion--that borders on heresy.

When the Letters began to be written, in 1847, Thackeray had his worst years, in a worldly sense, behind him. They were past: the times when he wrote in _Galignani_ for ten francs a day. Has any literary ghoul disinterred his old ten-franc articles in _Galignani_? The time of "Barry Lyndon," too, was over. He says nothing of that masterpiece, and only a word about "The Great Hoggarty Diamond." "I have been re-reading it. Upon my word and honour, if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a mean opinion of you. It was written at a time of great affliction, when my heart was very soft and humble. Amen. Ich habe auch viel geliebt."