"I don't pity anybody who leaves the world; not even a fair young girl in her prime; I pity those remaining. On her journey, if it pleases God to send her, depend on it there's no cause for grief, that's but an earthly condition. Out of our stormy life, and brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there must be a serene climate. Can't you fancy sailing into the calm?"Ah! nowhere else shall we find the Golden Bride, "passionless bride, divine Tranquillity."As human nature persistently demands a moral, and, as, to say truth, Thackeray was constantly meeting the demand, what is the lesson of his life and his writings? So people may ask, and yet how futile is the answer! Life has a different meaning, a different riddle, a different reply for each of us. There is not one sphinx, but many sphinxes--as many as there are women and men. We must all answer for ourselves. Pascal has one answer, "Believe!" Moliere has another, "Observe!" Thackeray's answer is, "Be good and enjoy!" but a melancholy enjoyment was his. Dr. John Brown says:
"His persistent state, especially for the later half of his life, was profoundly morne, there is no other word for it. This arose in part from temperament, from a quick sense of the littleness and wretchedness of mankind . . . This feeling, acting on a harsh and savage nature, ended in the saeva indignatio of Swift; acting on the kindly and sensitive nature of Mr. Thackeray, it led only to compassionate sadness."A great part of his life, and most of his happiness, lay in love.
"Ich habe auch viel geliebt," he says, and it is a hazardous kind of happiness that attends great affection. Your capital is always at the mercy of failures, of death, of jealousy, of estrangement. But he had so much love to give that he could not but trust those perilous investments.
Other troubles he had that may have been diversions from those. He did not always keep that manly common sense in regard to criticism, which he shows in a letter to Mrs. Brookfield. "Did you read the Spectator's sarcastic notice of 'Vanity Fair'? I don't think it is just, but think Kintoul (Rintoul?) is a very honest man, and rather inclined to deal severely with his private friends lest he should fall into the other extreme: to be sure he keeps out of it, I mean the other extreme, very well."That is the way to take unfavourable criticisms--not to go declaring that a man is your enemy because he does not like your book, your ballads, your idyls, your sermons, what you please. Why cannot people keep literature and liking apart? Am I bound to think Jones a bad citizen, a bad man, a bad householder, because his poetry leaves me cold? Need he regard me as a malevolent green-eyed monster, because I don't want to read him? Thackeray was not always true in his later years to these excellent principles. He was troubled about trifles of criticisms and gossip, bagatelles not worth noticing, still less worth remembering and recording. Do not let us record them, then.
We cannot expect for Thackeray, we cannot even desire for him, a popularity like that of Dickens. If ever any man wrote for the people, it was Dickens. Where can we find such a benefactor, and who has lightened so many lives with such merriment as he? But Thackeray wrote, like the mass of authors, for the literary class--for all who have the sense of style, the delight in the best language. He will endure while English literature endures, while English civilisation lasts. We cannot expect all the world to share our affection for this humourist whose mirth springs from his melancholy. His religion, his education, his life in this unsatisfying world, are not the life, the education, the religion of the great majority of human kind. He cannot reach so many ears and hearts as Shakespeare or Dickens, and some of those whom he reaches will always and inevitably misjudge him. Mais c'est mon homme, one may say, as La Fontaine said of Moliere. Of modern writers, putting Scott aside, he is to me the most friendly and sympathetic. Great genius as he was, he was also a penman, a journalist; and journalists and penmen will always look to him as their big brother, the man in their own line of whom they are proudest. As devout Catholics did not always worship the greatest saints, but the friendliest saints, their own, so we scribes burn our cheap incense to St. William Makepeace. He could do all that any of us could do, and he did it infinitely better. A piece of verse for Punch, a paragraph, a caricature, were not beneath the dignity of the author of "Esmond." He had the kindness and helpfulness which I, for one, have never met a journalist who lacked. He was a good Englishman;the boy within him never died; he loved children, and boys, and a little slang, and a boxing match. If he had failings, who knew them better than he? How often he is at once the boy at the swishing block and Dr. Birch who does not spare the rod! Let us believe with that beloved physician, our old friend Dr. John Brown, that "Mr.
Thackeray was much greater, much nobler than his works, great and noble as they are." Let us part with him, remembering his own words:
"Come wealth or want, come good or ill, Let young and old accept their part, And bow before the awful Will, And bear it with an honest heart."
