BOOKS OF THE DAY
Thackeray's Letters
The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray.
Edited by Gordon N. Ray. (Oxford University Press. 4 vols. 6 gns.) IT is often said that a writer reveals himself more clearly in his letters than in his creative work, and that you can argue the merit of the work from the value of the letters. It has, for instance, been contended on these grounds that Stevenson is a greater writer than Meredith. It is an extremely dangerous argument, for it omits the very obvious likelihood that some people like delivering themselves in letters, and are able to do so. But just because Keats, say, and Tchekov and Fournier could write miraculously revealing letters about their art, it does not follow that every creative writer should be able to do so. If people hold by this dubious thesis, they may often suffer disillusion, as has happened with some who expected too much from the correspondence of Racine and Boileau. There is, moreover, the further possibility that art is a specialised function of the personality ; that a man shows himself in his wholeness, in his real stature, only when warmed by the beat of creation. At other times something of him lies dormant, or at least inexpressive.
So much by way of preface to Thackeray's letters. He very seldom talks about his art, though he does about his work, as work ; and thoughts which move him seem to attain ripeness only when he is in the full flush of creative activity. They are oddly un- fulfilled even when he is talking to intimate friends. Mr. Ray offers us an admirable illustration of this, by way of a portion of a letter to Mrs. Brookfield, and a footnote giving us a parallel passage in Esmond. "I swear," he writes to Mrs. Brookfield, " the best thought I have is to remember that I shall have your love surviving me and with a constant tenderness blessing my memory. I can't all perish living in your heart." The passage does not read very con- vincingly, even when we get, a little further down, " Say that I die and live yet in the love of my survivors? Isn't that a warrant of immortality almost? " The whole argument leaves one unimpressed. But when the passage in Esmond is compared with this, the passage in " the 29th December " chapter ending, " But only true love lives after you—follows your memory with secret blessing—or precedes you and intercedes for you. Non omnis mortar—if dying, I yet live in a tender heart or two ; nor am lost and hopeless living, if a sainted departed soul still loves and prays for me," then you are conscious of a real feeling which has grown to some kind of philo- sophy by which a man lives. But if the letters—and still less the jouinals and travel diaries— do not reveal, as we may think, the whole Thackeray, we have to ask what manner of man they do give us. It is too easy to say that Thackeray was a cynic ; but an honest acceptance of man's failure to live up to his pretensions is not cynicism. Ne pas etre dupe (one wonders if Thackeray had ever heard of Stendhal) is not necessarily the mark of an evasive mind. It means keeping a sharp look-out on one's self. It was no cynic who wrote to his young daughters:
I met lots of acquaintances at Hombourg from whom I was glad to get away. They are backbiting, slandering, envying and bullying in that little place, as well as in greater cities, and as I don't profess to be better than my neighbours, I can't help thinking that I am a very paltry contemptible rogue. Or if we haven't the vices of meanness, avarice and a narrow spirit, I suppose we have some other,, that we deserve to be whipped for.
There is, in fact, nothing 'mean or backbiting about Thackeray. The man we find in reading these letters is indeed a man of the world, who liked its traffic, and the comfort, graces and manners to be met with among the socially distinguished; but a man who hated snobbery, was generous and open towards his enemies, inde- fatigable in helping his friends, and of profound family affections. The many charming letters to his mother, the solicitous care he showed for his children, are evidence enough for the last ; and his wife's madness after only five years of marriage was the cruellest blow fate could have dealt a man of his temperament. He seems to have had little ease of life; gruelling hard work, equally gruelling social engagements—a life of stress hardly relieved by his devoted friendship for Mrs. Brookfield—made up a kind of stockade against contemplation. Not that he was at all a philosopher, as his letters on religion to Fitzgerald when he was young, and to his mother when he was mature, go to show. As to religion, he was the typical Victorian, as Matthew Arrold was at a different level, desiring Christianity, but unable to accept its dogma. In politics he seems to have been incredibly simple-minded. Where he really fulfilled himself was in his minute observation of life in detail, afterwards synthesised in creation. Again and again in his letters you find him picking up hints for future characters. It was in that sort of way, you feel, that he realised himself ; there you will find the Thackeray that matters more than in the letters, where, however, you meet a lively, intelligent, open-hearted individual, proud in lesser matters, humble in the great ones, struggling good- humouredly enough to find a balance at once mundane and intellectual.
Mr. Gordon Ray has produced a magnificent edition (of which the first two volumes only are to hand) upon which the Oxford Press has lavished its best powers. Some of the letters are already known, though a large proportion of these have been published only in part ; a very large number, and the most important, such as those to his mother and his future wife, are now made public for the first time. A few, some of the more curious ones written in tiny writing in odd shapes, are given in facsimile, and a great many are accompanied by the entertaining illustrations with which Thackeray loved to adorn his epistles. Mr. Ray gives us as many notes and letters from others as are necessary to explain certain incidents, such as the absurd tiff with Fogter who had told Tom Taylor that Thackeray was " false as hell." The edition opens with a handy biographical table and an extremely useful account of Thackeray's chief correspondents ; moreover, we are told on every occasion where the text comes from. It is a relief to find the notes not uncomfort- ably tucked away at the end of the volume, but where you want to have them, on the page containing the matter that gave occasion for them. We may grumble here and there about the placing of certain undated letters, and ba for the moment irritated by being referred to appendixes which will appear in the later volumes ; but there is no doubt that Mr. Ray has given us the definitive edition in worthy scholarly form, and has whetted our appetite not only for the volumes still to come, but for the biography which he
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