Thackery's "Esmond"

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Title:     Thackery's "Esmond"
Author: Austin Dobson [More Titles by Dobson]

At this date, Thackeray's Esmond has passed from the domain of criticism into that securer region where the classics, if they do not actually "slumber out their immortality," are at least preserved from profane intrusion. This "noble story"[1]--as it was called by one of its earliest admirers--is no longer, in any sense, a book "under review." The painful student of the past may still, indeed, with tape and compass, question its details and proportions; or the quick-fingered professor of paradox, jauntily turning it upside-down, rejoice in the results of his perverse dexterity; but certain things are now established in regard to it, which cannot be gainsaid, even by those who assume the superfluous office of anatomising the accepted. In the first place, if Esmond be not the author's greatest work (and there are those who, like the late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, The Virginians, however admirable in detached passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis Duval, of which the promise was "great, remains unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the author's masterpiece in another manner, Esmond cannot properly be compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete in verisimilitude or on any satisfactory terms with a contemporary picture. Nevertheless, in its successful reproduction of the tone of a bygone epoch, lies Esmond's second and incontestable claim to length of days. Athough fifty years and more have passed since it was published, it is still unrivalled as the typical example of that class of historical fiction, which, dealing indiscriminately with characters real and feigned, develops them both with equal familiarity, treating them each from within, and investing them impartially with a common atmosphere of illusion. No modern novel has done this in the same way, nor with the same good fortune, as Esmond; and there is nothing more to be said on this score. Even if--as always--later researches should have revised our conception of certain of the real personages, the value of the book as an imaginative tour de force is unimpaired. Little remains therefore for the gleaner of to-day save bibliographical jottings, and neglected notes on its first appearance.

[Note:

1: "Never could I have believed that Thackeray, great as his abilities are, could have written so noble a story as Esmond."--WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR, August 1856.]

In Thackeray's work, the place of The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of Her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself--lies midway between his four other principal books, Vanity Fair, Pendennis, The Newcomes, and The Virginians; and its position serves, in a measure, to explain its origin. In 1848, after much tentative and miscellaneous production, of which the value had been but imperfectly appreciated, the author found his fame with the yellow numbers of Vanity Fair. Two years later, adopting the same serial form, came Pendennis. Vanity Fair had been the condensation of a life's experience; and excellent as Pendennis would have seemed from any inferior hand, its readers could not disguise from themselves that, though showing no falling off in other respects, it drew to some extent upon the old material. No one was readier than Thackeray to listen to a whisper of this kind, or more willing to believe that--as he afterwards told his friend Elwin concerning The Newcomes--"he had exhausted all the types of character with which he was familiar." Accordingly he began, for the time, to turn his thoughts in fresh directions; and in the year that followed the publication of Pendennis, prepared and delivered in England and Scotland a series of Lectures upon the English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. With the success of these came the prompting for a new work of fiction,--not to be contemporary, and not to be issued in parts. His studies for the Humourists had saturated him with the spirit of a time to which--witness his novelette of Barry Lyndon--he had always been attracted; and when Mr. George Smith called on him with a proposal that he should write a new story for L1000, he was already well in hand with Esmond,--an effort in which, if it were not possible to invent new puppets, it was at least possible to provide fresh costumes and a change of background. Begun in 1851, Esmond progressed rapidly, and by the end of May 1852 it was completed. Owing to the limited stock of old-cut type in which it was set up, its three volumes passed but slowly through the press; and it was eventually issued at the end of the following October, upon the eve of the author's departure to lecture in America. In fact, he was waiting on the pier for the tender which was to convey him to the steamer, when he received his bound copies from the publisher.

Mr. Eyre Crowe, A.R.A., who accompanied Thackeray to the United States, and had for some time previously been acting as his "factotum and amanuensis," has recorded several interesting details with regard to the writing of Esmond, To most readers it will be matter of surprise, and it is certainly a noteworthy testimony to the author's powers, that this attempt to revive the language and atmosphere of a vanished era was in great part dictated. It has even been said that, like Pendennis, it was all dictated; but this it seems is a mistake, for, as we shall see presently, part of the manuscript was prepared by the author himself. As he warmed to his work, however, he often reverted to the method of oral composition which had always been most congenial to him, and which explains the easy colloquialism of his style. Much of the "copy" was taken down by Mr. Crowe in a first-floor bedroom of No. 16 Young Street, Kensington, the still-existent house where Vanity Fair had been written; at the Bedford Hotel in Covent Garden; at the round table in the Athenasum library, and elsewhere. "I write better anywhere than at home,"--Thackeray told Elwin,--"and I write less at home than anywhere." Sometimes author and scribe would betake themselves to the British Museum, to look up points in connection with Marlborough's battles, or to rummage Jacob Tonson's Gazettes for the official accounts of Wynendael and Oudenarde. The British Museum, indeed, was another of Esmond's birthplaces. By favour of Sir Antonio Panizzi, Thackeray and his assistant, surrounded by their authorities, were accommodated in one of the secluded galleries. "I sat down,"--says Mr. Crowe--"and wrote to dictation the scathing sentences about the great Marlborough, the denouncing of Cadogan, etc., etc. As a curious instance of literary contagion, it may be here stated that I got quite bitten, with the expressed anger at their misdeeds against General Webb, Thackeray's kinsman and ancestor; and that I then looked upon Secretary Cardonnel's conduct with perfect loathing. I was quite delighted to find his meannesses justly pilloried in Esmond's pages." What rendered the situation more piquant,--Mr. Crowe adds,--all this took place on the site of old Montague House, where, as Steele's "Prue" says to St. John in the novel," you wretches go and fight duels."[2]

Note:

[2] With Thackeray in America, 1893, p. 4.

Those who are willing to make a pilgrimage to Cambridge, may, if they please, inspect the very passages which aroused the enthusiam of Thackeray's secretary. In a special case in the Library of Trinity College, not far from those which enclose the manuscripts of Tennyson and Milton, is the original and only manuscript of Esmond, being in fact the identical "copy" which was despatched to the press of Messrs. Bradbury and Evans at Whitefriars. It makes two large quarto volumes, and was presented to the College (Esmond's College!) in 1888 by the author's son-in-law, the late Sir Leslie Stephen. It still bears in pencil the names of the different compositors who set up the type. Much of it is in Thackeray's own small, slightly-slanted, but oftener upright hand, and many pages have hardly any corrections.[3] His custom was to write on half-sheets of a rather large notepaper, and some idea may be gathered of the neat, minute, and regular script, when it is added that the lines usually contain twelve to fifteen words, and that there are frequently as many as thirty-three of these lines to a page. Some of the rest of the "copy" is in the handwriting of the author's daughter, now Lady Ritchie; but a considerable portion was penned by Mr. Eyre Crowe. The oft-quoted passage in 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.[4]

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.[5] 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:

3: 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).

4: "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.

5: 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."[6]

Note:

[6] 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.[7]

[Note:

7: 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.[8] 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.[9]

[Notes:

8: 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."

9: 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[10]--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."[11] 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.[12]

Notes:

[10] Esmond, Book ii, chap, ii.

[11] Ib. Book iii, chap, iii.

[12] Spectator, No. 221, November 13, 1711.

 

This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of Esmond. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic authority, that "no man, woman, or child in Esmond, ever says anything that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne." This is one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head, invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly "copied the language of Queen Anne,"--he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell (who was his fellow-passenger to America on the Canada) to point out in Esmond a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth century; and that the author of The Biglow Papers promptly discovered such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew better than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left out all the A's (as well as the poetry) in his verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew's Cross, a lozenge,--everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured after when "copying the language of Queen Anne," and succeeded in attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional picturesque archaisms, such as "yatches" for "yachts," or despise the artful aid of terminal k's, long s's, and old-cut type. Consequently, as was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest prejudice against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact), it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of Queen Anne's Colonel which could never have been employed until Her Majesty had long been "quietly inurned." What is more,--if we mistake not,--the author of Esmond sometimes refrained from using an actual eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct told him it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known anecdote of Steele beside his father's coffin, In Tatler No. 181, reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, "My mother catched me in her arms." "Catched" is good enough eighteenth-century for Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it "caught," and "caught" it remains to this day both in Esmond and The Humourists.

[The end]
Austin Dobson's essay: Thackery's "Esmond"

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