book ii
. chap. vi. about "bringing your sheaves with you," was written by Thackeray himself almost as it stands; so was the sham _Spectator_, hereafter mentioned, and most of the chapter headed "General Webb wins the Battle of Wynendael." But the splendid closing scene,--"August 1st, 1714,"--is almost wholly in the hand of Mr. Crowe. It is certainly a remarkable fact that work at this level should have been thus improvised, and that nothing, as we are credibly informed, should have been before committed to paper.[64]
When _Esmond_ first made its appearance in October 1852, it was not without distinguished and even formidable competitors. _Bleak House_ had reached its eighth number; and Bulwer was running _My Novel in Blackwood_. In _Fraser_, Kingsley was bringing out _Hypatia_; and Whyte Melville was preluding with _Digby Grand_. Charlotte Bronte must have been getting ready _Villette_ for the press; and Tennyson--undeterred by the fact that his hero had already been "dirged" by the indefatigable Tupper--was busy with his _Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington_.[65] The critics of the time were possibly embarrassed with this wealth of talent, for they were not, at the outset, immoderately enthusiastic over the new arrival. The _Athenaeum_ was by no means laudatory. _Esmond_ "harped upon the same string"; "wanted vital heat"; "touched no fresh fount of thought"; "introduced no novel forms of life"; and so forth. But the _Spectator_, in a charming greeting from George Brimley (since included in his _Essays_), placed the book, as a work of art, even above _Vanity Fair_ and _Pendennis_; the "serious and orthodox" _Examiner_, then under John Forster, was politely judicial; the _Daily News_ friendly; and the _Morning Advertiser_ enraptured. The book, this last declared, was the "beau-ideal of historical romance." On December 4 a second edition was announced. Then, on the 22nd, came the _Times_. Whether the _Times_ remembered and resented a certain delightfully contemptuous "Essay on Thunder and Small Beer," with which Thackeray retorted to its notice of _The Kickkburys on the Rhine_ (a thing hard to believe!) or whether it did not,--its report of _Esmond_ was distinctly hostile. In three columns, it commended little but the character of Marlborough, and the writer's "incomparably easy and unforced style." Thackeray thought that it had "absolutely stopped" the sale. But this seems inconsistent with the fact that the publisher sent him a supplementary cheque for L250 on account of _Esmond's_ success.
Notes:
[63] One is reminded of the accounts of Scott's "copy." "Page after page the writing runs on exactly as you read it in print"--says Mr. Mowbray Morris. "I was looking not long ago at the manuscript of _Kenilworth_ in the British Museum, and examined the end with particular care, thinking that the wonderful scene of Amy Robsart's death must surely have cost him some labour. They were the cleanest pages in the volume: I do not think there was a sentence altered or added in the whole chapter" (Lecture at Eton, _Macmillan's Magazine_ (1889), lx. pp. 158-9).
[64] "The sentences"--Mr. Crowe told a member of the Athenaeum, when speaking of his task--"came out glibly as he [Thackeray] paced the room." This is the more singular when contrasted with the slow elaboration of the Balzac and Flaubert school. No doubt Thackeray must often have arranged in his mind precisely much that he meant to say. Such seems indeed to have been his habit. The late Mr. Lockcer-Lampson informed the writer of this paper that once, when he met the author of Esmond in the Green Park, Thackeray gently begged to be allowed to walk alone, as he had some verses In his head which he was finishing. They were those which afterwards appeared in the _Cornhill_ for January 1867, under the title of _Mrs. Katherine's Lantern_.
[65] The Duke died 14th Sept. 1852.
Another reason which may have tended to slacken--not to stop--the sale, is also suggested by the author himself. This was the growing popularity of _My Novel_ and _Villette_. And Miss Bronte's book calls to mind the fact that she was among the earliest readers of _Esmond_, the first two volumes of which were sent to her in manuscript by George Smith, She read it, she tells him, with "as much ire and sorrow as gratitude and admiration," marvelling at its mastery of reconstruction,--hating its satire,--its injustice to women. How could Lady Castlewood peep through a keyhole, listen at a door, and be jealous of a boy and a milkmaid! There was too much political and religious intrigue--she thought. Nevertheless she said (this was in February 1852, speaking of vol. i.) the author might "yet make it the best he had ever written." In March she had seen the second volume. The character of Marlborough (here she anticipated the _Times_) was a "masterly piece of writing." But there was "too little story." The final volume, by her own request, she received in print. It possessed, in her opinion, the "most sparkle, impetus, and interest." "I hold," she wrote to Mr. Smith, "that a work of fiction ought to be a work of creation: that the _real_ should be sparingly introduced in pages dedicated to the _ideal_" In a later letter she gives high praise to the complex conception of Beatrix, traversing incidentally the absurd accusation of one of the papers that she resembled. Blanche Amory [the _Athenaeum_ and _Examiner_, it may be noted, regarded her as "another Becky"]. "To me," Miss Bronte exclaims, "they are about as identical as a weasel and a royal tigress of Bengal; both the latter are quadrupeds, both the former women." These frank comments of a fervent but thoroughly honest admirer, are of genuine interest. When the book was published, Thackeray himself sent her a copy with his "grateful regards," and it must have been of this that she wrote to Mr. Smith on November 3,--"Colonel Henry Esmond is just arrived. He looks very antique and distinguished in his Queen Anne's garb; the periwig, sword, lace, and ruffles are very well represented by the old _Spectator_ type."[66]
Note:
[66] Mr. Clement Shorter's _Charlotte Bronte and her Circle_, 1896, p. 403; and Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Bronte_, 1900, pp. 561 et seq.
One of the points on which Miss Bronte does not touch,--at all events does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have been printed,--is the marriage with which _Esmond_ closes. Upon this event it would have been highly instructive to have had her views, especially as it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first reviewers. It was the gravamen of the _Times_ indictment; to the critic of _Fraser_ it was highly objectionable; and the _Examiner_ regarded it as "incredible." Why it was "incredible" that a man should marry a woman seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed once in vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually reminded ("she looks the sister of her daughter" says the old Dowager at Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it obvious to Lady Castlewood's children, "Mother's in love with you,--yes, I think mother's in love with you," says downright Frank Esmond; the only impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. "As for you," she tells Esmond, "you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry 'O caro! O bravo!' whilst you read your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff" [which shows that she herself had read Swift's _Grand Question Debated_]. "Mamma would have been the wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years older than she does," "You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old man!" adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The situation is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the author, if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that his story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be some diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have accepted Thackeray's solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early Victorian age. To those who read _Esmond_ now, noting carefully the almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side, as developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained. And that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is handled with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[67]
Note:
[67} Thackeray's own explanation was more characteristic than convincing. "Why did you"--said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of Edinburgh--"Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?" "My dear lady," he replied, "it was not I who married them. They married themselves." (Dr. _John Brmon_, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903, pp. 96-7.)
Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps, at this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less vigorously alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have suffered from the very attention which _Esmond_ and _The Humourists_ have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of Marlborough is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good enough for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists have considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would the latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse _that_ presentment. In the purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the _Lectures_, and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been offered on those performances. The Swift of _The Humourists_, modelled on Macaulay, was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in the novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[68] Addison has been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more discussion. That Thackeray's sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously conceived under the domination of the "poor Dick" of Addison, and dwells far too persistently upon Steele's frailer and more fallible aspect. No one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed periwig, who hiccups Addison's _Campaign_ in the Haymarket garret, or the fuddled victim of "Prue's" curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and that he was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar, but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent politician. Probably the author of _Esmond_ considered that, in a mixed character, to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally "in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind" (as Lamb says), anything like biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that Thackeray, talking to him once about _The Virginians_, which was then appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in Goldsmith, "representing him as he really was, a little, shabby, mean, shuffling Irishman." These are given as Thackeray's actual words. If so, they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last lecture of _The Humourists._[69]
Notes:
[68] Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. "As for Swift, you haven't made me alter my opinion"--he replied to Hannay's remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as a clergyman, was insincere. "Of course,"--he wrote in September, 1851, in a letter now in the British Museum,--"any man is welcome to believe as he likes for me _except_ a parson; and I can't help looking upon Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades ... with a scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness."
[69] _Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters_, 1902, i. 187. The intention was never carried out. In _The King over the Water_, 1908, Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another portrait in _Esmond_,--that of the Chevalier de St. George,--not without injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang--like Rob Roy--is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the reader to this highly interesting study.
But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse, his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it triumphantly in his maturity by those _Novels by Eminent Hands_ in which the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in stray letters and detached passages.
In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in _Denis Duval_; and in the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess Castlewood[70]--a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of that "baby-faced" Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself "L duchesse de Portsmout." It is better still in the letter from Walpole to General Conway in chap. xl. of _The Virginians_, which is perfect, even to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the crown and top of these _pastiches_ is certainly the delightful paper, which pretends to be No. 341 of the _Spectator_ for All Fools' Day, 1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats "Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix," to what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a "bite."[71] Here Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele's voice, but his very trick of speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the "tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive," that although this pseudo-_Spectator_ is stated to have been printed "exactly as those famous journals were printed" for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables, it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph, unluckily appended an English translation,--a concession to the country gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained, holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison's own phrase) "words to the wise," of no concern to unlearned persons.[72]
Notes:
[70] _Esmond_, Book ii , chap, ii.
[71] _Ib_.