6 NOVEMBER 1852, Page 14

BOOKS.

THACRERAY'S ESMOND.* Esmond is an autobiographical memoir of the first five-and- thirty years of the life of an English gentleman of family, written in his old age after his retirement to Virginia ; and edited with an introduction by his daughter, for the instruction and amusement of her children and descendants, and to give them a lively portrait of the noble gentleman her father. It is historical, inasmuch as political events enter both as motives to the actors and as facts influencing their fortunes, and because historical personages are brought upon the scene : both are necessary elements in the career of a gentleman and a soldier, but neither forms the staple or the main object of the book,—which concerns itself with the characters and fortunes of the noble family of Castlewood, of which Henry Esmond is a member. The period embraced is from the accession of James the Second to the death of Queen Anne, and the manners depicted are those of the English aristocracy. Archaeology is not a special object with the author ; though both costume, in its more limited sense, and manners, are, we believe, accurately preserved. But Wardour Street and the ioyal Academy need fear no com- petitor in Mr. Thackeray. His business lies mainly with men and women, not with high-heeled shoes and hoops and patches, and old china and carved high-backed chairs. Nor have Mr. Macanlay's forthcoming volumes been anticipated, except in one instance, where the Chevalier St. George is brought to England, 'has an inter- view with his sister at Kensington just before her death, is abso- lutely present in London at the proclamation of George the First, and indeed only misses being James the Third, King of Great Bri- tain and Ireland, by grace of his own exceeding baseness and folly. Scott, who had a reverence for the Stuarts impossible to Mr. Thackeray with his habit of looking at the actors in life from the side-scenes and in the green-room rather than from before the foot- lights, has not scrupled to take a similar liberty with his Chevalier in Redyauntlet, merely to arrange a striking tableau at the fall of the curtain. But these violations of received tradition with re- spect to such wen-known historical personages, force upon the reader unnecessarily the fictitious character of the narrative, and are therefore better avoided.

There is abundance of incident in the book, but not much more plot than in one of Defoe's novels : neither is there, generally speaking, a plot in a man's life, though there may be and often is in sections of it. Unity is given not by a consecutive and self- developing story, but by the ordinary events of life blended with those .peculiar to a stirring time acting on a family group, and bringing out and ripening their qualities ; these again control- ling the subsequent events, just as happens in life. The book has the great charm of reality. The framework is, as we have said, historical : men with well-known names, political, literary, military, pass and repass ; their sayings and doings are interwoven with the sayings and doings of the fictitious characters ; and all reads like a genuine memoir of the time. The rock ahead of his- torical novelists is the danger of reproducing too much of their raw material; making the art visible by which they construct their imago-of a bygone time; painting its manners and the out- side of its life with the sense of contrast with which men of the present naturally view them, or looking at its parties and its politics in the light of modern questions : the rock ahead of Mr. Thackeray, in particular, was the temptation merely to dra- matize his lectures : but he has triumphed over these difficulties, and Queen Anne's Cplonel writes his life, —and a very interesting life it is,—just as such a Queen Anne's Colonel might be supposed to have written it. We shall give no epitome of the story, be. cause the merit of the book does not lie there, and what story there is readers like to find out for themselves.

Mr. Thackeray's humour does not mainly consist in the creation of oddities of manner, habit, or feeling ; but in so representing ac- tual men and women as to excite a sense of incongruity in the reader's mind—a feeling that the follies and vices described are deviations from an ideal of humanity always present to the writer. The real is described vividly, with that perception of individuality which constitutes the artist; but the description implies and sug- gests a standard higher than itself, not by anyaLlirect assertion of such a standard, but by an unmistakeable irony. The moral an- tithesis of actual and ideal is the root from which springs the pecu- liar charm of Mr. Thackeray's writings ; that mixture of gayety and seriousness, of sarcasm and tenderness, of enjoyment and cy- nicism, which reflects so well the contradictory consciousness of man as a being with senses and passions and limited knowledge, yet with a conscience and a reason speaking to him of eternal laws and a moral order of the universe. It is this that makes Mr. Thackeray a profound moralist, just as Hogarth showed his know- ledge of perspective by drawing a landscape throughout in violation of its rules. So, in Mr. Thackeray's picture of society as it is, society as it ought to be is implied. He could not have painted Vanity Fair as he has, unless Eden had been shining brightly in his inner eyes. The historian of " snobs" indicates in every touch his fine sense of a gentleman or a lady. No one could be simply amused with Mr. Thackeray's descriptions or his dialogues. A shame at one's own defects, at the defects of the world in which one was living, was irresistibly aroused along with the reception of the particular portraiture. But while he was dealing with his own • The History of Henry Esmond, Esq., a Colonel in the Service of her Majesty Q. Anne. Written by Himself. In three volumes. Published by Smith, Elder, and Co. age, his keen perceptive faculty prevailed, and the actual predomi- nates in his pictures of modern society. His fine appreciation of high character has hitherto been chiefly shown (though with bright exceptions) by his definition of its contrary. But, getting quite out of the region of his personal experiences, he has shows his true nature without this mark of satire and irony. The ideal is no longer implied, but realized, in the two leading characters of Esmond. The medal is reversed, and what appeared as scorn of baseness is revealed as love of goodness and nobleness—what appeared as cynicism is presented as a heart-worship of what is pure, affectionate, and unselfish. He has selected for his hero a very noble type of the Cavalier softening into the man of the eighteenth century, and for his heroine one of the sweetest wo. men that ever breathed from canvass or from book since Rat facile painted Marks and S ere created a new and higher con- sciousness of woman in the= of Germanic Europe. Celonel Es- mond is indeed a fine gentleman,—the accomplished man, the gal- lant soldier, the loyal heart, and the passionate lover, whose richly contrasted but harmonious character Clarendon would have de- lighted to describe ; while Falkland and Richard Lovelace would have worn him in their hearts' core. Lucy Hutchinson's husband might have stood for his model in all but politics, and his Toryism has in it more than a smack of English freedom very much akin to that noble patriot's Republicanism. Especially does he recall Colonel Hutchinson in his lofty principle, his unswerving devotion to it, a certain sweet seriousness which comes in happily to temper a penetrating intellect, and a faculty of seeing things and persons as they are, to which we owe passage after passage in the book, that it requires no effort to imagine Thackeray uttering himself in those famous lectures of his, and looking up with his kind glance to catch the delighted smile of his audience at his best points. Nor is there anything unartistic in this reminder of the author ; for this quality of clear insight into men and things united with a kindly nature and a large capacity for loving is not limited to any particular time or age, and combines with Colonel Esmond's other qualities so as to give no impression of incongruity. But besides the harmonizing effect of this sweetly serious tempera- ment, the record of Colonel Esmond's life is throughout a record of his attachment to one woman, towards whom his childish grati- tude for proteotion grows with his growth into a complex feeling, in which filial affection and an unconscious passion are curiously blended. So unconscious, indeed, is the passion, that, though the reader has no difficulty in interpreting it, Esmond himself is for years the avowed and persevering though hopeless lover of this very lady's daughter. The relation between Esmond and Rachel Viscountess Castlewood is of that sort that nothing short of con- summate skill could have saved it from becoming ridiculous or offensive, or both. In Mr. Thackeray's hands, the difficulty has become a triumph, and has given rise to beauties which a safer am- bition would have not dared to attempt. The triumph is attained by the conception of Lady Castlewood's character. She is one of those women who never grow old, because their lives are in the af- fections, and the suffering that comes upon such lives only brings out strength and beauty unperceived before. The graces of the girl never pass away, but maturer loveliness is added to them, and spring, summer, autumn, all bloom on their faces and in their hearts at once. A faint foreshadowing of this character we have had before in Helen Pendennis : but she had been depressed and crushed in early life, had married for a home, certainly without passion; and her nature was chilled and despondent. Lady Cas- tlewood has the development that a happy girlhood, and a mar- riage with the man she devotedly loves, can give to a woman ; and her high spirit has time to grow for her support when it is needed. Even the weaknesses of her character are but as dimples on a lovely face, and make us like her the better for them, because they give individuality to what might else be felt as too ideal. Nothing can be more true or touching than the way this lady demeans herself when she finds her husband's affection waning from her ; and Mr. Thackeray is eminently Mr. Thackeray in his delineation of that waning love on the one side, and the strength and dignity which the neglected wife gradually draws from her own hitherto untried resources, when she ceases to lean on the arm that was withdrawn, and discovers that the heart she had worshiped was no worthy idol. But to those who would think the mother " slow" we can have no hesitation in recommending the daughter. Miss Beatrix Esmond—familiarly and correctly termed " Trix " by her friends —is one of those dangerous young ladies who fascinate every one, man or woman, that they choose to fascinate, but care for nobody but themselves ; and their care for themselves simply extends to the continual gratification of a boundless love of admiration, and the kind of power which results from it. If Miss Rebecca Sharpe had really been a Montmorency, and a matchless beauty, and a maid of honour to a Queen, she might have sublimated into a Beatrix Esmond. It is for this proud, capricious, and heartless beauty, that Henry Esmond sighs out many years of his life, and does not find out, till she is lost to bun and to herself, how much he loves her " little mamma," as the saucy young lady is fond of calling Lady Castlewood. Beatrix be- longs to the class of women who figure most in history, with eyes as bright and hearts as hard as diamonds, as Mary Stuart said of herself; and Mary Stuart and Miss Esmond have many points in common. Of her end we are almost disposed to say with Othello, "Oh! the pity of it, Iago, oh! the pity of it." Unlovely as she is because unloving, yet her graces are too fair to be so dragged through the dirt—that stream is too bright to end in a cisewer. But the tragedy is no less tragical for the tawdry comedy of its close.

Life has no pity for the pitiless, no sentiment for those who trample on love as a weakness.

These three characters are the most prominent in the book. With one or the other of the two women Henry Esmond's thoughts are almost always engaged ; and it is to win the reluctant love of the daughter that he seeks distinction as a soldier, a poli- tician, and finally a conspirator in behalf of the son of King James. In this threefold career, he has intercourse with Addison, Steele, and the wits ; serves under Marlborough at Blenheim and Rami- fies ; is on terms of intimacy with St. John and the Tory leaders. A. succession of Viscounts Castlewood figure on the scene, all un- mistakeable English noblemen of the Stuart period. A dowager Viscountess is a more faithful than flattering portrait of a class of ladies of rank of that time. The Chevalier St. George ap- pears oftener than once. The great Duke of Hamilton is about to make Beatrix his Duchess, when he is basely murdered in that doubly fatal duel with the execrable Lord Mohun, who had twelve years before slain, also in a duel, my Lord Viscount Castlewood, the father of Beatrix. The book has certainly no lack of incident ; the persons come and go as on the scene of real life ; and all are clearly conceived, and sketched or painted in full with no uncertain aim or faltering hand. To draw charac- ter has been the predominant object of the author; and he has so done it as to sustain a lively interest and an agreeable alternation of emotions, through a form of composition particularly difficult to manage without becoming soon tedious, or breaking the true con- ditions of the form. Mr. Thackeray has overcome not only this self-imposed difficulty, but one greater still, which he could not avoid—his own reputation. Esmond will, we think, rank higher as a work of art than either Vanity Fair or Pendennis ; because the characters are of a higher type, and drawn with greater finish, and the book is more of a complete whole : not that we anticipate for it anything like the popularity of the former of these two books, as it is altogether of a graver cast, the satire is not so pungent, the canvass is far less crowded, and the subject is distant and nafa-

; and, may be, its excellences will not help it to a very large public. Our first quotation is from the introduction, by Colonel Esmond's daughter ; and is a description of her father's character.

" And it is since I knew him entirely, for during my mother's life he never quite opened himself to me—since I knew the value and splendour of that af- fection which he bestowed upon me—that I have come to understand and pardon what, I own, used to anger me in my mother's life-time, her jealousy respecting her husband's love. 'Twas a gift so precious, that no wonder she who had it was for keeping it all, and could part with none of it, even to her daughter. "Though I never heard my father use a rough word, 'twas extraordinary with how much awe his people regarded him ; and the servants on our planta- tion, both those assigned from England and the purchased negroes, obeyed him with an eagerness such as the most severe taskmasters round about us could never get from their people. He was never familiar though perfectly sim- ple and natural ; he was the same with the meanest man as with the greatest, and as courteous to a black slave-girl as to the governor's wife. No one ever thought of taking a liberty with him, (except once a tipsy gentleman from York, and I am bound to own that my papa never forgave him) : he set the humblest people at once on their ease with him, and brought down the most ar- rogant by a grave satirick way, which made persons exceedingly afraid of him. His courtesy wasnot put on like a Sunday suit, and laid by when the company went away ; it was always the same, as he was always dressed the same whether for a dinner by ourselves or for a great entertainment. They say he liked to be the first in his company ; but what company was there in which he would not be first ? When I went to Europe for my education, and we passed a winter at London, with my half-brother my Lord Castle- wood and his second lady, I saw at her Majesty's court some of the most famous gentlemen of those days ; and I thought to myself, none of these are better than may papa : and the famous Lord Bolingbroke, who came to us from Hawley, said as much, and that the men of that time were not like those of his youth : Were your father, Madam,' he said, to go into the woods, the Indiana would elect him Sachem' ; and his lordship was pleased to call me Pocahontas."

THE DEATH OF LOVE.

Much of the quarrels and hatred which arise between married people come, in my mind, from the husband's rage and revolt at discovering that his slave and bedfellow, who is to minister to all his wishes, and is church-sworn to honour and obey him, is his superior ; and that he, and not she ought to be the subordinate of the twain : and in these controversies, I thinlyblay the cause of my lord's anger against lady. When he left her, she began to think for herself, and her thoughts were not in his favour. After the illu- mination, when the love-lamp is put out that anon we spoke of, and by the common daylight you look at the picture, what a daub it looks ! what a clumsy effigy !How many men anti wives come to this knowledge, think you? And if it be painful to a woman to find herself mated for life to a boor, and ordered to love and honour a dullard, it is worse still for the man himself perhaps, whenever in his dim comprehension the idea dawns that his slave and-drudge yonder is in truth his superior; that the woman who does his bidding, and submits to his humour, should be his lord; that she can think a thousand things beyond the power of his muddled brains ; and that in yonder head, on the pillow opposite to him, lie a thousand feelings, mysteries of thought, latent scorns and rebellions, whereof he only dimly perceives the existence as they look out furtively from her eyes : treasures of love doomed to perish without a hand to gather them ; sweet fancies and images of beauty that would grow and unfold themselves into flower ; bright wit that would shine like diamonds could it be brought into the sun : and the tyrant in possession crushes the outbreak of all these, drives them back like slaves into the dungeon and darkness, and chafes without that his prisoner is rebellious and his sworn subject undutiful and refractory. So the lamp was out in Castlewood Hall, and the lord and lady there saw each other as they were. With her illness and altered beauty my lord's fire for his wife disappeared ; with his selfishness and faithlessness her foolish fiction of love and reverence was rent away. Love ?—who is to love what is base and un- lovely? Respect ?—who is to respect what is gross and sensual? Not all the marriage-oaths sworn before all the parsons, cardinals, ministers, muftis, and rabbins in the world, can bind to that monstrous allegiance. This couple was living apart then ; the woman happy to be allowed to love and tend her children, (who were never of her own good-will away from her,) and thank- ful to have saved such treasures as these out of the wreck in which the better Part of her heart went down.

THE GREAT DERE OF MARLBOROUGH ; A TORY SKETCH.

Our chief, whom England and all Europe, saving only the Frenchmen, worshiped almost, had this of the godlike in him, that he was impassible victory, victo, before danger, before defeat. Before the greatest obstacle or the most trivial ceremony—before a hundred thousand men drawn in battens, or a peasant slaughtered at the door of his burning hovel—before a carouse of drunken German lords, or a monarch's court, or a cottage-table where his plans were laid, or an enemy's battery vomiting flame and death and strewing corpses round about him—he was always cold, calm, resolute, like Fate. He performed a treason or a court-bow, he told a falsehood as black as Styx, as easily as he paid a compliment or spoke about the weather. He took a mistress and left her; betrayed his benefactor, and supported him, or would have murdered him, with the same calmness always, and having no more remorse than Clotho when she weaves the thread, or Lachesis when she cuts it. In the hour of battle, I have heard the Prince of Savoy's officers say, the Prince became possessed with a sort of warlike fury ; his eyes lighted up ; he rushed hither and thither, raging ; he shrieked curses and encouragement, yelling and harking his doody war-dogs on, and him- self always at the first of the hunt. Our Duke was as calm at the mouth of the cannon as at the door of a drawingroom. Perhaps he could not have been the great man he was, had he had a heart either for love or hatred, or pity or fear, or regret or remorse. He achieved the highest deed of daring, or deepest calculation of thought, as he performed the very meanest action of which a man is capable ; told a lie, or cheated a fond woman, or robbed a poor beggar of a halfpenny, with a like awful serenity, and equal capacity of the highest and lowest acts of our nature. His qualities were pretty well known in the army, where there were parties of all politicks, and of plenty of shrewdness and wit; but there existed such a perfect confidence in him, as the first captain of the world, and such a faith and admiration in his prodigious genius and fortune, that the very men whom he notoriously cheated of their pay, the chiefs whom he used and in- lured—(for he used all men, great and small, that came near him, as his instruments alike, and took something of theirs, either some quality or some property,—the dood of a soldier, it might be, or a jewelled hat, or a hundred thousand crowns from a king, or a portion out of a starving sentinel's three farthings; or, when he was young, a kiss from a woman, and the gold chain off her neck, taking all he could from woman or man, and having, as I have said, this of the godlike in him, that he could see a hero perish or a sparrow fall with the same amount of sympathy for either. Not that he had no tears : he could always order up his reserve at the proper moment to battle ; he could draw upon tears or smiles alike, and whenever need was for using this cheap coin. He would cringe to a shoeblaek, as he would flatter a minister or a monarch ; be haughty, be humble, threaten, repent, weep, grasp your hand, or stab you, whenever he saw occasion)—But yet those of the army who knew him best and had suffered most from him admired him most of all ; and as he rode along the lines to battle or galloped up in the nick of time to a battalion reeling from before the enemy's charge or shot, the fainting men and officers got new courage as they saw the splendid calm of his face and felt that his will made them irresistible.

Even these few extracts render it unnecessary to enlarge upon the charms of the style. It is manly, clear, terse, and vigorous, reflecting every mood—pathetic, grave, or sarcastic—of the miter : and the writing -lias these qualities because the writer knows what he means to say, and does not give the publie thoughts half-worked-out, or thoughts on matters where clear thinking is impossible.

Mr. Thackeray has left this delightful book behind him to console London for his absence in America. In wishing him a prosperous enterprise and a safe return, may we not hope that his genial pre- sence may add another to the many links which bind England to the United States, and that Americans may learn from him that our highest order of men of letters can find something in the great Transatlantic Saxondom beyond food for a flippant sneer or farci- cal description