Modern English Books of Power Part 3

THACKERAY GREATEST MASTER OF FICTION

THE MOST ACCOMPLISHED WRITER OF HIS CENTURY--TENDER PATHOS UNDER AN AFFECTATION OF CYNICISM AND GREAT ART IN STYLE AND CHARACTERS.

Of all modern English authors, Thackeray is my favorite. Humor, pathos, satire, ripe culture, knowledge of the world and of the human heart, instinctive good taste and a style equaled by none of his fellows in its clearness, ease, flexibility and winning charm--these are some of the traits that make the author of _Vanity Fair_ and _Esmond_ incomparably the first literary artist as well as the greatest writer of his age. Whether he would have been as fine a writer had he been given a happy life is a question that no one can answer. But to my mind it has always seemed as though the dark shadow that rested on his domestic life for thirty years made him infinitely tender to the grief and pain of others. Probably it came as a shock to most lovers of Thackeray to read in a news item from London only three or four years ago that the widow of Thackeray was dead, at the great age of ninety years. She had outlived her famous husband nearly a full half century, but of her we had heard nothing in all this time. When a beautiful young Irish girl she was married to the novelist, and she made him an ideal wife for a few years. Then her mind gave way, and the remainder of her long career was spent within the walls of a sanatorium--more lost to her loved ones than if she had been buried in her grave. The knowledge of her existence, which was a ghastly death in life, the fact that it prevented him from giving his three young girls a real home, as well as barred him under the English law from marrying again--all these things to Thackeray were an ever-present pain, like acid on an open wound. It was this sorrow, from which he could never escape that gave such exquisite tenderness to his pathos; and it was this sorrow, acting on one of the most sensitive natures, that often sharpened his satire and made it merciless when directed against the shams and hypocrisies of life.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY FROM A DRAWING BY SAMUEL LAURENCE, ENGRAVED BY J.C. ARMYTAGE]

Thackeray's fame rests mainly on two great books--_Vanity Fair_ and _Henry Esmond_. The first has been made very real to thousands of readers by the brilliant acting of Mrs. Fiske in Becky Sharp. The other is one of the finest historical novels in the language and the greatest exploit in bringing over into our century the style, the mode of thought, the very essence of a previous age. Thackeray was saturated with the literature of the eighteenth century, and in _Esmond_ he reproduced the time of Addison and Steele as perfectly as he made an imitation of a number of the SPECTATOR. This literary _tour de force_ was made the more noteworthy by the absolute lack of all effort on the novelist's part. The style of Queen Anne's age seemed a part of the man, not an a.s.sumed garment. While in the heroine of _Vanity Fair_ Thackeray gave the world one of the coldest and most selfish of women, he atoned for this by creating in _Esmond_ the finest gentleman in all English literature, with the single exception of his own Colonel Newcome.

Strict injunctions Thackeray left against any regulation biography, and the result is that the world knows less of his life before fame came to him than it does of any other celebrated author of his age.

The scanty facts show that he was born in Calcutta in 1811; that he was left a fortune of $100,000 by his father, who died when he was five years old; that, like most children of Anglo-Indians, he was sent to school in England; that he was prepared for college at the old Charter House School; that he was graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, and that while in college he showed much ability as a writer of verse and prose, although he took no honors and gained no prizes. After reading law he was moved to become an artist and spent some time in travel on the Continent.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tLE-PAGE TO "VANITY FAIR" DRAWN BY THACKERAY, WHO FURNISHED THE ILl.u.s.tRATIONS FOR MANY OF HIS EARLIER EDITIONS]

But this delightful life was rudely cut short by the loss of his fortune and he was forced to earn his living by literature and journalism. Under various pseudonyms he soon gained a reputation as a satirist and humorist, his first success being _The Great Hoggarty Diamond_. Then years of work for PUNCH and other papers followed before he won enduring fame by _Vanity Fair_, which he styled "a novel without a hero."

Charlotte Bronte, who gained a great reputation by _Jane Eyre_, added to Thackeray's vogue by dedicating to him in rarely eloquent words the second edition of her novel, against which preachers fulminated because of what they called its immoral tendencies. Then in rapid succession Thackeray wrote _Pendennis_, _Henry Esmond_, _The Newcomes_, _The Virginians_, _Lovel the Widower_ and _The Adventures of Philip_. All these are masterpieces of wit, satire and humor, cast in a perfect style that never offends the most fastidious taste, yet they are neglected to-day mainly because they do not furnish exciting incidents.

Thackeray, like d.i.c.kens in his readings, made a fortune by his lectures, first on "The English Humorists," and later on "The Four Georges," and, like d.i.c.kens, he received the heartiest welcome and the largest money returns from this country.

He died alone in his room on Christmas eve in the fine new home in London which he had recently made for himself and his three daughters.

Thackeray was a giant physically, with a mind that worked easily, but he was indolent and always wrote under pressure, with the printer's devil waiting for his "copy." He was a thorough man of the world, yet full of the freshness of fancy and the tenderness of heart of a little child. All children were a delight to him, and he never could refrain from giving them extravagant tips. The ever-present grief that could not be forgotten by fame or success made him very tender to all suffering, especially the suffering of the weak and the helpless. Yet, like many a sensitive man, he concealed this kindness of heart under an affectation of cynicism, which led many unsympathetic critics to style him hard and ferocious in his satire.

Like d.i.c.kens, Thackeray was one of the great reporters of his day, with an eye that took in unconsciously every detail of face, costume or scene and reproduced it with perfect accuracy. The reader of his novels is entertained by a series of pen pictures of men and women and scenes in high life and life below stairs that are photographic in their clearness and fidelity. d.i.c.kens always failed when he came to depict British aristocratic life; but Thackeray moved in drawing-rooms and brilliant a.s.semblages with the ease of a man familiar from youth with good society, and hence free from all embarra.s.sment, even in the presence of royalty.

Thackeray's early works are written in the same perfect, easy, colloquial style, rich in natural literary allusions and frequently rhythmic with poetic feeling, which marked his latest novel. He also had perfect command of slang and the c.o.c.kney dialect of the Londoner.

No greater master of dialogue or narrative ever wrote than he who pictured the gradual degradation of Becky Sharp or the many self-sacrifices of Henry Esmond for the woman that he loved.

Howells and other critics have censured Thackeray severely because of his tendency to preach, and also because he regarded his characters as puppets and himself as the showman who brought out their peculiarities. There is some ground for this criticism, if one regards the art of the novelist as centered wholly in realism; but such a hard and fast rule would condemn all old English novelists from Richardson to Thackeray.

It ought not to disturb any reader that Defoe turns aside and gives reflections on the acts of his characters, for these remarks are the fruit of his own knowledge of the world. In the same way Thackeray keeps up a running comment on his men and women, and these bits of philosophy make his novels a storehouse of apothegms, which may be read again and again with great profit and pleasure. The modern novel, with its comparative lack of thought and feeling, its insistence upon the absolute effacement of the author, is seldom worth reading a second time. Not so with Thackeray. Every reading reveals new beauties of thought or style. An entire book has been made up of brief extracts from Thackeray's novels, and it is an ideal little volume for a pocket companion on walks, as Thackeray fits into any mood and always gives one material for thought.

[Ill.u.s.tration: WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY A CARICATURE DRAWN BY HIMSELF]

Of all Thackeray's novels _Vanity Fair_ is the best known and most popular. It is a remarkable picture of a thoroughly hard, selfish woman whom even motherhood did not soften; but it is something more than the chronicle of Becky Sharp's fortunes. It is a panoramic sketch of many phases of London life; it is the free giving out by a great master of fiction of his impressions of life. Hence _Vanity Fair_ alone is worth a hundred books filled merely with exciting adventures, which do not make the reader think. The problems that Thackeray presents in his masterpiece are those of love, duty, self-sacrifice; of high aims and many temptations to fall below those aspirations; of sordid, selfish life, and of fine, n.o.ble, generous souls who light up the world and make it richer by their presence.

Thackeray, in _Vanity Fair_, has sixty characters, yet each is drawn sharply and clearly, and the whole story moves on with the ease of real life. Consummate art is shown in the painting of Becky's gradual rise to power and the great scene at the climax of her success, when Rawdon Crawley strikes down the Marquis of Steyne, is one of the finest in all fiction. Though Becky knows that this blow shatters her social edifice, she is still woman enough to admire her husband in the very act that marks the beginning of the decadence of her fortunes.

_Vanity Fair_, read carefully a half-dozen times, is a liberal education in life and in the art of the novelist.

Personally, I rank _Pendennis_ next to _Vanity Fair_ for the pleasure to be derived from it. From the time when the old Major receives the letter from his sister telling of young Arthur's infatuation for the cheap actress, Miss Fotheringay, the story carries one along in the leisurely way of the last century. All the people are a delight, from Captain Costigan to Fowker, and from the French chef, who went to the piano for stimulus in his culinary work, to Blanche Amory and her amazing French affectations. But _Pendennis_ is not popular.

Nor is _Henry Esmond_ popular, although it is worthy to rank with _The Cloister and the Hearth_, _Adam Bede_ and _Tess of the D'Urbervilles_.

There is little relief of humor in _Esmond_, but the story has a strong appeal to any sympathetic reader, and it is the one supreme achievement in all fiction in which the hero tells his own story.

Thackeray's art is flawless in this tale, and it sometimes rises to great heights, as in the scenes following the death of Lord Castlewood, the exposure of the Prince's perfidy, the selfishness of Beatrice and the great sacrifice of Esmond.

s.p.a.ce is lacking to take up Thackeray's other works, but it is safe to say if you read the three novels here hastily sketched you cannot go amiss among his minor works. Even his lighter sketches and his essays will be found full of material that is so far above the ordinary level that the similar work of to-day seems cheap and common. Happy is the boy or girl who has made Thackeray a chosen companion from childhood.

Such a one has received unconsciously lessons in life and in culture that can be gained from few of the great authors of the world.

CHARLOTTE BRONTe AND HER TWO GREAT NOVELS

"JANE EYRE" AND "VILLETTE" ARE TOUCHED WITH GENIUS--TRAGEDY OF A WOMAN'S LIFE THAT RESULTED IN TWO STORIES OF Pa.s.sIONATE REVOLT AGAINST FATE.

Charlotte Bronte is always linked in my memory with Thackeray because of her visit to the author of _Vanity Fair_ and its humorous and pathetic features. She went to London from her lonely Yorkshire home, and the great world, with its many selfish and unlovely features, made a painful impression on her. Even Thackeray, her idol, was found to have feet of clay. But this "little Puritan," as the great man called her, was endowed with the divine genius which was forced to seek expression in fiction, and nowhere in all literature will one find an author who shows more completely the compelling force of a powerful creative imagination than this little, frail, self-educated woman, who had none of the advantages of her fellow writers, but who surpa.s.sed them all in a certain fierce, Celtic spirit which forces the reader to follow its bidding.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHARLOTTE BRONTe FROM THE EXQUISITELY SYMPATHETIC CRAYON PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. NOW IN THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY OF LONDON]

He who would get a full realization of the importance of this Celtic element in English literature cannot afford to neglect _Jane Eyre_ and _Villette_, the best of Charlotte Bronte's works. Old-fashioned these romances are in many ways, oversentimental, in parts poorly constructed, but in all English fiction there is nothing to surpa.s.s the opening chapters of _Jane Eyre_ for vividness and pathos, and few things to equal the greater part of _Villette_, the tragedy of an English woman's life in a Brussels boarding school.

Who can explain the mystery of the flowering of a great literary style among the bleak and desolate moors of Yorkshire? Who can tell why among three daughters of an Irish curate of mediocre ability but tremendously pa.s.sionate nature one should have developed an abnormal imagination that in _Wuthering Heights_ is as powerful as Poe's at his best, and another should have matured into the ablest woman novelist of her day and her generation? These are freaks of heredity which science utterly fails to explain.

Charlotte Bronte was born in 1816 and died in 1855. She was one of six children who led a curiously forlorn life in the old Haworth parsonage in the midst of the desolate Yorkshire moors. The outlook on one side was upon a gloomy churchyard; on the other three sides the eye ranged to the horizon over rolling, dreary moorland that looked like a heaving ocean under a leaden sky. One brother these five sisters had, a brilliant but superficial boy, with no stable character, who became a drunkard and died after lingering on for years, a source of intense shame to his family. The girls were left motherless at an early age.

Four were sent to a boarding school for clergymen's daughters, but two died from exposure and lack of nutritious food, and the others, starved mentally and physically, returned to their home. This was the school that Charlotte held up to infamy in _Jane Eyre_.

The three sisters who were left, in the order of their ages, were Emily, Charlotte and Anne. They, with their brother, lived in a kind of dream world. Charlotte was the natural story-teller, and she wove endless romances in which figured the great men of history who were her heroes. She also told over and over many weird Yorkshire legends.

These children devoured every bit of printed matter that came to the parsonage, and they were as thoroughly informed on all political questions as the average member of Parliament.

At an age when normal girls were playing with their dolls these precocious children were writing poems and stories. Their father developed the ways of a recluse and never took his meals with his children. Living in this dream world of their own, these children could not understand normal girls. They were terribly unhappy at school and came near to death of homesickness. Finally Emily and Charlotte found a congenial school and in a few years they both made great strides in education. Charlotte tried teaching and also the work of governess, but finally both decided to open a girls' school of their own. To prepare themselves in French, Emily and Charlotte went to a boarding school in Brussels.

This was the turning point in Charlotte's life. Intensely ambitious, she worked like a galley slave and soon mastered French so that she wrote it with ease and vigor. There is no question that she had a girlish love for her teacher, as pa.s.sionate as it was brief, and that her whole outlook was broadened by this experience of a world so unlike the only one that she had known.

The story of Charlotte's life is told beautifully by Mrs. Gaskell, the well-known author of _Cranford_. It is one of the finest biographies in the language, and also one of the most stimulating. The reader who follows Charlotte's stormy youth is made ashamed of his own lack of application when he reads of the girl's tireless work in self-culture in the face of much bodily weakness and great unhappiness.

Read of her experiences in Brussels and you will get some idea of the tremendous vitality of this frail girl with the luminous eyes and the fiery spirit that no labor could tire. Mrs. Gaskell has drawn largely upon Charlotte's letters, which are as vivid and full of character as any of her fiction. Genius flashes from them; one feels drawn very close to this woman who raged against her physical infirmities, but overcame them bravely. When the spirit moved her she poured out her soul to her friend in words that grip the heart after all these years.

The boarding-school project fell through, and for some years the three sisters lived at home and devoted themselves to literary work. The first fruits of their pen was a small volume of poems by Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell, the pseudonyms of Charlotte, Emily and Anne. This book fell practically stillborn from the press, but the sisters were undaunted and each began a novel. Without experience of life it is not strange that these stories lacked merit.

Charlotte drew her novel from her Brussels experience and called it _The Professor_. Though it was far the best, it was rejected, but Emily's _Wuthering Heights_ and Anne's _Agnes Gray_ were published.

Emily's novel revealed a powerful but ill-regulated imagination, with scenes of splendid imaginative force, yet morbid and unreal as an opium dream. It received some good notices, but Anne's was mediocre and fell flat. Nothing daunted by the refusal of the publishers to bring out her first book, Charlotte began _Jane Eyre_, largely autobiographical in the early chapters, and this book was promptly accepted and published in August, 1847.

_Jane Eyre_ was a great success from the day it came from the press.

It was an epoch-making novel because it dragged into the fierce light of publicity many questions which the English public of that day had decided to leave out of print. To us of today it contains nothing unusual, for modern women writers have gone far beyond Charlotte Bronte in their demands for freedom from many strict social conventions. What makes the book valuable is the glimpse which it gives of the wild revolt of a pa.s.sionate nature against the coldness, the hypocrisy and the many shams of the social life of England in the middle of the last century.

This novel is also noteworthy for its intense picture of the sufferings of a lonely, unappreciated girl, who felt in herself the stirrings of genius and who hungered and thirsted for appreciation.

The terrible pictures of Lowood, the fiction name of the Cowan's Bridge School, where her two sisters contracted their fatal illness, are stamped upon the brain of every reader, as are those of the humiliations of the governess. The style of this book was a revelation in that period of formal writing. Like Stevenson, Charlotte Bronte wrought with words as a great artist works with his colors, and many of her descriptions in _Jane Eyre_ have never been surpa.s.sed. Hers was that brooding Celtic imagination which, when given full play, takes the reader by the hand and shows him the heights and depths of human love and suffering.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MRS. GASKELL FROM THE PORTRAIT BY GEORGE RICHMOND, R.A. MRS. GASKELL'S "LIFE OF BRONTe" IS ONE OF THE FINEST BIOGRAPHIES IN THE LANGUAGE]

The success of _Jane Eyre_ opened wide the doors of London to the unknown author. For a time her ident.i.ty was hidden, but when it was revealed she was induced to go up to London and see the great world.

Thackeray was especially kind to her, but his efforts to entertain this Yorkshire recluse were dismal failures. Nothing is more amusing than his daughter's story of the great novelist, slipping out of the house one night, when he had asked several celebrities to meet Charlotte Bronte. The party was a terrible fiasco, and so he escaped, putting his finger to his lips as he opened the front door to warn his daughter that she must not reveal his flight. Charlotte's correspondence with her publisher is also full of pathos. It shows how keenly she felt her aloofness from the world, which she could not overcome.