THACRERAY'S LETTERS.*
THESE letters, it is scarcely necessary to say, have already appeared in Scribner's Magazine, and it is probable that they are familiar to the admirers of Thackeray. It is well, how- ever, that they should be printed in a form worthy of them, for not only are they good as literature, but they express as in. a mirror some of the finest features of the writer's character. Indeed, no reader after perusing them can doubt, even if Colonel Newcome has failed to convince him, that the great satirist, cynic though he might appear, had a heart fall of susceptibility and tenderness. His humour, his badinage, his descriptive passages, the art with which he plays with his subject, are not more truly characteristic of Thackeray than the glow of warm and generous feeling which finds spontaneous expression in these lettere. We may not admire the author more after reading this unrestrained chit-chat with dear friends ; but we certainly love the man better.
The introduction, by Mrs. Brookfield, explains in brief words all that the public can ask to know about this delightful volume. " The letters," she states, " which form this collection were most of them written by Mr. Thackeray to my husband, the late Rev. W. H. Brookfield, and myself, from about 1847, and continuing during many years of intimate friendship, beginning from the time when he first lived in London, and when he especially needed our sympathy. His happy married life had been broken
• A Collodion of Letters of W. M. Thookoray, 18117-11365. With Portraits and Reproductions of Letters and Drawings. London Smith and Elder. up by the malady which fell upon his young wife after the birth of her youngest child; his two remaining little girls were ander his mother's care at Paris. Mr. Thackeray was living alone in London." And at the close of the volume we are told that daring the many years these lettere have been in Mrs. Brook. field's possession, no one has read them out of her own family, with the exception of Thackeray's daughter, Mrs. Ritchie, "until these last few months." "As my own life draws to a close," she continues, "I still look back to the confidence and affection with which their writer honoured me with gratitude too deep for words."
We may be sure that the gratitude was not all upon one side. Thackeray was still young when one of the bitterest sorrows a man can have broke up his home and left him desolate. What a joy must it have been to him at such a crisis to win friends not only of culture and refinement, but of the warmest sympathy! Mrs. Brookfield is far too modest to say anything about herself, but it ie not difficult to judge of her and of her husband from what they proved to Thackeray. In Mr. Brook- field he found a brother, in his wife a sister, and to her, as was most natural, the larger number of the letters are written. They show him in all moods, and expreas,with the familiarity of warm friendship, the feelings of the moment. To our thinking, they are the perfection of letter-writing, full of nature and spontaneity, and written with the conscious freedom of a man who knows that what he utters, whether it be nonsensical, pathetic, or sentimental, will not be misunderstood. " I can't live," he says, "without the tenderness of some woman, and expect when I am sixty I shall be marrying a girl of eleven or twelve, innocent, barley-sugar-loving, in a pinafore." He liked to give sympathy, as well as to receive it. "What's the good of a brother to you, if you can't tell him things P If I am dismal, don't I give you the benefit of the dumps," he writes on one occasion; and how deeply the writer for Punch felt the sadness and vanity of life, even when in the prime of manhood, may be seen in numerous confessions to his affectionate friend and sister :— " I don't pity anybody who leaves the world," he says, "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. Oat of our stormy life and brought nearer the Divine light and warmth, there mast be a serene climate. Can't you fanoy sailing into the calm ? Would you care about going on the voyage, only for the dear souls left on the other shore P But we shan't be parted from them, no doubt, though they are from tie."
Writing of the sudden death of Charles Buller, he says :—
" Good God ! think about the poor mother surviving, and what an anguish that must be ! If I were to die,. I cannot bear to think of my mother living beyond me, as I daresay she will. But isn't it an awful, awful sudden summons ? There go wit, fame, friendship, ambition, high repute! Ah ! aimons nous bien. It seems to me that is the only thing we can carry away. When we go, let us have some who love us wherever we are."
And how sad it seems to hear a strong man of forty saying to Mr. Brookfield,—" We've lived as much in forty as your good old father in his fourscore years ; don't you think so ?—and how awfully tired and lonely we are !" Thackeray could say, and no doubt justly, that he had a great faculty of enjoyment; but it was tempered with a vein of melancholy not uncommon in men of a thoughtful and imaginative temperament, and perhaps, if biography speaks truly, more common in this century than at an earlier period. Somehow, the "noble burden of humanity" seems to grow heavier as the world grows older.
One of the most charming traits in Thackeray's character is his love of children, and of this it would be easy to give several illustrations from the letters. " Will you kiss those little maids for me ? I should like to hear their prattle through the door," he writes ; and recalling a happy visit to the Brookfields at Southampton, he observes :- " I wonder whether ever again I shall have such a happy, peaceful fortnight as that last ! How sunshiny the landscape remains in ny mind, I hope for always; and the smiles of dear children. I mu hardly see as I write for the eye-water, but it isn't with grief, but for the natural pathos of the thing. How happy your dear regard makes me, how it takes off the solitude and eases it; may it continue, pray God, till your bead is white as mine, and our children have children of their own ! Instead of being unhappy because this delightful holiday is over or all but over, I intend that the thoughts of it should serve to make me only the more cheerful, and help me, please God, to do my duty better."
And the letter closes with "a whole boxfall of kisses to the children."
After listening to the chorus of boys in Magdalen Chapel, be says that children's voices charm him so that they set all his sensibilities into a quiver. "These pretty brats, with sweet, innocent voices, and white robes, sing quite celestially,—no, not celestially, for I don't believe it is devotion at all, but a high delight, out of which one comes, not unpurified, I hope, but with a thankful, pleased, gentle frame of mind." And here is another expression of the same tender feeling :-
" When I saw that nice little Mrs. S— with ber child, yesterday, of course I thought about somebody else. The tones of a mother's voice speaking to an infant play the dance with me sometimes; the charming nonsense and tenderness work upon me until I feel like a woman or a great big baby myself. Fiddlededee !"
Thackeray has said that he knows nothing more manly or more tender than some of the brief notes written in what Swift calls "his little language," in his journal to " Stella." There is in them also a playful familiarity which is infinitely charming ; and in reading these letters to Mrs. Brookfield, we have been frequently reminded of Swift's homely phrases, and of the small domestic details which he sends to "M. D." Swift writes as if he were talking, and this, as Thackeray truly says in one of his letters, is what he does. He watches the post anxiously, fears a letter will not come, and vows that if it does not, "you won't get any letter to-morrow ; no, nothing." He asks his dear lady,—" Are you better for a little country air ? And did you have clothes enough to your bed ?" He comes home from the play tired and sleepy, having laughed very pleasantly at non- sense, and writes,—" just one word to say good-night." He takes up the pen at midnight, after breaking down in a speech at the Literary Fund dinner, saying,—" I hope you two are sound asleep. Why isn't there somebody that I could go and smoke a pipe to? Bon soir ! Bat 0 ! what a smash I've made ! I am talking quite loud out to myself at the Garrick, sentences I intended to have uttered ; but they wouldn't come in time."
To literature there are few allusions. There is the heartiest, manliest praise of Dickens at a time when he was infinitely more prosperous and popular than the author of Vanity Fair. Fielding's Amelia is described as the most delightful portrait of a woman that ever was painted ; but Joseph Andrews is both coarse and careless, and gives him no particular pleasure. When, a few years later, Thackeray came to lecture on Fielding, he had altered his judgment of this novel ; but there are no indica- tions that he ever appreciated at his fall worth the immortal Parson Adams. His own novels are frequently mentioned, and, like Dickens, he writes of his characters as if he was personally acquainted with them and with their places of abode. In the United States, where he gained nearly one pound a minute by his lectures, ho was gratified by the reception given to him as a man of letters :—" There's something simple in the way in which these kind folks regard a man ; they read our books as if we were Fielding, and so forth. The other night, some men were talking of Dickens and Bnlwer as if they were equal to Shakespeare, and I was pleased to find myself pleased to hear them praised. The prettiest girl in Philadelphia, poor soul, has read Vanity Fair twelve times I" It is only by quotations that it is possible to give in any degree the flavour of the letters ; but, after all, such brief passages taken out of their connection are far from satisfactory. Still, they may answer their purpose by sending our readers to a volume that will richly repay them for perusal. It may be added that it contains a great number of illustrations from Thackeray's pencil, in some of which Mrs. Brookfield may well feel a womanly pride, and also several portraits of the novelist.
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