Obrazy na stronie
PDF
ePub

liked him as a scholar, Radicals who knew that he associated with the aristocracy, — and the numerous weaklings to whom his severe truth and perfect honesty of art seemed horrible after the riotous animal spirits, jolly caricature, and lachrymose softness of the style which he was putting out of fashion, — this crew, we say, was by no means satisfied with the undoubted fact that Thackeray was becoming the favorite writer of the cultivated classes. They accordingly began to call his honesty cynicism, and his accuracy reporting. They forgot that tears are pure in proportion to the depth from which they come, and not to the quantity in which they flow, and that the tenderness of a writer is to be estimated by the quality of his pathos. They also forgot that as what they called hardness was mere fidelity to truth, so what they called stenographic detail was mere finish of art. The richer imaginativeness of "Esmond," and the freer play of feeling in which the author allowed himself to indulge when dealing with a past age, came in good time to rebuke cavillers, and prove that Thackeray's mind w is rich as well as wide. Esmond," we take it, is the favorite novel of his choicest admirers. He takes certain liberties with history in it. For instance, the Duke of Hamilton, whom he represents as about to marry Beatrix when he is cut off in a duel, left a widow, spoken of by Swift in the "Journal to Stella." But as Scott makes Leicester quote the "Midsummer Night's Dream” in “Kenilworth," when Shakespeare was about twelve or thirteen years of age, this may be excused.

It is a pity that Thackeray did not write expressly on America, for we think that he would have written the most impartial English book to which that country has yet given rise. When he returned from this first visit, he was a good deal away from town. "Since my return from America," he writes in August 1854, "I have hardly been in London at all, and when here, in such a skurry of business and pleasure as never to call a day my own scarcely." The passage is significant. Few lives were more engrossed than his, discharging, as he did, at once the duties of a man of letters and a

man of fashion. He dined out a great deal during the season. He went to the theatres. He belonged to three clubs — the Athenæum, Reform, and Garrick to say nothing of minor associations for the promotion of good fellowship. With less of this wear and tear, we should have had more work from him, should have had, perhaps, the History which long dwelt in his imagination as one of the creations of the future. As it is, he achieved a great deal during the last eight or ten years of his life. Two such elaborate novels as the "Newcomes " and "Virginians," a second trip to America, and a ramble over Great Britain, with a new set of Lectures on the "Four Georges," - not to mention a contested election, and what he did for the "Cornhill," established on the strength of his name, and for a time directly conducted by him, these were great doings for a man who, though naturally robust, was plagued and menaced by more than one vexatious disorder of long continuance. And he did them greatly, And he did them greatly,-going into the world gayly and busily to the last, and always finding time for such holy little offices of personal kindness and charity as gave himwe believe and know more real pleasure than all his large share of the world's applause. He was much gratified by the success of the "Four Georges" (a series which superseded an earlier scheme for as many discourses on "Men of the World") in Scotland. "I have had three per cent. of the whole population here," he wrote from Edinburgh, in November, 1856. “If I could but get three per cent. of - London!" He thoroughly appreciated the attention and hospitality which he met with during these lecturing tours. And if, as would sometimes happen, a local notability's adoration became obtrusive, or such a person thrust his obsequious veneration upon him beyond the limits of the becoming, his forbearance was all the more respectable on account of his sensitiveness.

Latterly he had built himself a handsome house in Kensington, to which he moved from Onslow Square, Brompton, — his residence after leaving the Young Street in which he wrote "Vanity Fair." It was a dwelling worthy of one who really

represented literature in the great world, and who, planting himself on his books, yet sustained the character of his profession with all the dignity of a gentleman. A friend who called on him there from Edinburgh, in the summer of 1862, knowing of old his love of the Venusian, playfully reminded him what Horace says of those who, regardless of their sepulchre, employ themselves in building houses

[blocks in formation]

Nay,” said he, “I am memor sepulchri, for this house will always let for so many hundreds (mentioning the sum) a year.” How distant, then, seemed the event which has just happened, and with which the mind obstinately refuses to familiarize itself, though it stares at one from a thousand broadsheets ! Well, indeed, might his passing-bell make itself heard through all the myriad joy-bells of the English Christmas! It is long since England has lost such a son; it will be long before she has such another to lose. He was indeed emphatically English, English as distinct from Scotch, no less than English as distinct from Continental, -a different type of great man from Scott, and a different type of great man from Balzac. The highest purely English novelist since Fielding, he combined Addison's love of virtue with Johnson's hatred of cant, Horace Walpole's lynx-like eye for the mean and the ridiculous, with the gentleness and wide charity for mankind as a whole, of Goldsmith. Non omnis mortuus est. He will be remembered in his due succession with these men for ages to come, as long as the hymn of praise rises in the old Abbey of Westminster,1 and wherever the English tongue is native to men, from the banks of the Ganges to those of the Mississippi.2 This humble tribute to his illustrious and beloved memory comes from one whom he loaded with benefits, and' to whom it will always throw something of sadness over the great city where he first knew him, that it contains his too early grave.

1 "Dum Capitolium

Scandet cum tacita virgine Pontifex."

2 "Dicar qua violens obstrepit Aufidus," &c. .

IN MEMORIAM.

It has been desired by some of the personal friends of the great writer who established the "Cornhill Magazine,” that its brief record of his having been stricken from among men should be written by the old comrade and brother in arms who pens these lines, and of whom he often wrote himself, and always with the warmest generosity.

I saw him first, nearly twenty-eight years ago, when he proposed to become the illustrator of my earliest book. I saw him last, shortly before Christmas, at the Athenæum Club, when he told me that he had been in bed three days - that, after these attacks, he was troubled with cold shiverings, "which quite took the power of work out of him" and that he had it in his mind to try a new remedy which he laughingly described. He was very cheerful, and looked very bright. In the night of that day week he died.

The long interval between those two periods is marked in my remembrance of him by many occasions when he was supremely humorous, when he was irresistibly extravagant, when he was softened and serious, when he was charming with children. But by none do I recall him more tenderly than by two or three that start out of the crowd, when he unexpectedly presented himself in my room, announcing how that some passage in a certain book had made him cry yesterday, and how that he had come to dinner, "because he could n't help it," and must talk such passage over. No one can ever have seen him more genial, natural, cordial, fresh, and honestly impulsive, than I have seen him at those times. No one can be surer than I, of the greatness and goodness of the heart that then disclosed itself.

We had our differences of opinion. I thought that he too much feigned a want of earnestness, and that he made a pretense of undervaluing his art, which was not good for the art that he held in trust. But when we fell upon these topics, it was never very gravely, and I have a lively image of him in my mind, twisting both his hands in his hair, and stamping about, laughing, to make an end of the discussion.

When we were associated in remembrance of the late Mr.

Douglas Jerrold, he delivered a public lecture in London, in the course of which he read his very best contribution to "Punch," describing the grown-up cares of a poor family of young children. No one hearing him could have doubted his natural gentleness, or his thoroughly unaffected manly sympathy with the weak and lowly. He read the paper most pathetically, and with a simplicity of tenderness that certainly moved one of his audience to tears. This was presently after his standing for Oxford, from which place he had dispatched his agent to me, with a droll note (to which he afterward added a verbal postscript), urging me to 66 come down and make a speech, and tell them who he was, for he doubted whether more than two of the electors had ever heard of him, and he thought there might be as many as six or eight who had heard of me." He introduced the lecture just mentioned, with a reference to his late electioneering failure, which was full of good sense, good spirits, and good humor.

He had a particular delight in boys, and an excellent way with them. I remember his once asking me with fantastic gravity, when he had been to Eton where my eldest son then was, whether I felt as he did in regard of never seeing a boy without wanting instantly to give him a sovereign? I thought of this when I looked down into his grave, after he was laid there, for I looked down into it over the shoulder of a boy to whom he had been kind.

These are slight remembrances; but it is to little familiar things suggestive of the voice, look, manner, never, nevermore to be encountered on this earth, that the mind first turns in a bereavement. And greater things that are known of him, in the way of his warm affections, his quiet endurance, his unselfish thoughtfulness for others, and his munificent hand, may not be told.

If, in the reckless vivacity of his youth, his satirical pen had ever gone astray or done amiss, he had caused it to prefer its own petition for forgiveness, long before:

I've writ the foolish fancy of his brain;

The aimless jest that, striking, hath caused pain,

The idle word that he'd wish back again.

« PoprzedniaDalej »