A GENTLE VICTORIAN.
Corincriotsrs of modern letters can at their best make a double appeal. They arc the most human and companionable of biographies, drawing us by countless unpretentious threads
into the fabric of another's life, and they are, no less than the lyric or essay, a work of art, the expression of some unique personality, and as such can even be torn from their context without seriously diminishing their value. As letter-writers, however, both Thackeray and his daughter were too generously human to combine often the two appeals. Lady Ritchie herself confessed, " I care for too many things even to do one perfectly," and her very captivating social genius robbed her personality of that element of the unusual, that critical, even malicious detachment, which gives such spice to the corres- pondence., for example, of Mrs. Carlyle. Too long a spell of
summer sunshine sets us longing for the sting of hailstones. It is so in art and letters with too consistent a charm. We suspect the-trivial, and although Lady Ritchie's charm was too personal and too pointed ever to degenerate into a,
manner, we sometimes could wish that she had not taken quite so seriously to heart her father's admonition to be " careful, grateful, and ladylike," and so resolutely exorcised those agreeable daemons which fought, we gather, in the breast of the young Anne Thackeray. Our chief complaint against Victorianism is that it tended to blur outlines by suppressing the positive virtues and vices together, and we have little doubt that Lady Ritchie would have written even better than she did, if she had not been so careful to cultivate that " lurking prettiness " which her father told her should be a quality even of buffoonery.
The forty-two letters from Thackeray himself are, however, a most valuable addition to this book, both as a fragment of the biography which can never be written, and as stressing the close affinity of temperament existing between father and daughter. FitzGerald's description of Thackeray as " grand and gay " is particularly happy in the light of these letters. " There's beautiful affection in this country," he wrote of America, " immense tenderness, romantic personal enthusiasm,
and a general kindliness and serviceableness and good nature.' He drew himself with his beaming bourgeois smile in the
words. Humorous, magnanimous, garrulous and shrewd, Thackeray was the very negation of a " personage." How tender and yet sensible he was his letters to his children testify. And he was devout too in the manner at once business-like and sentimental, of his class and time, a devout- ness which we hear echoed in his daughter's journal in such resolutions as this : " If I live, try and be as good as I can, don't get frightened, be faithful, be moderate yet unending in feeling."
And the likeness is traceable in a dozen particulars. Thackeray's spendthrift exuberance, the surplus energy which drove him to invent portmanteau words and sprinkle his script with facetious sketches, is reproduced more deli- cately in his daughter. She, too, was resplendently natural
and rootedly averse to literary phrase-making, and the same high altruism which led Thackeray to write : "Though my marriage was a wreck I would do it over again, for behold.
love is the crown and completion of all earthly good," was also the inspiration of all her days. Her grace and charm lay simply in this necessity of giving herself to friends, to nature, to literature, to life.
, The very impatience of her generosity explains her weakness as a literary artist. She went through life in a dream of sympathy, feeling the essence of things, responding every- ' where to what she called rather vaguely the sincere and • true. She knew in plenty those moments when we are clasped in the arms of nature too closely to see her features, and perhaps her happiest descriptions are of the elements—" her one excitement "—and' particularly of the wind. But she could seldom focus finely as a Dorothy Words- worth could, and so there is a certain sameness about her raptures over " piping days " at home and abroad. Similarly, the many eminent Victorians who flit through these pages leave no very lasting impression behind, although occasionally, as if by happy chance, she achieved a sentence full of insight, as when she wrote of Renan : " I like him so much better than I expected, because I see though it's partly put on, yet it is instinctively real feeling which makes him sentimental." She was typical of her time in not inquiring too closely into "real feeling." She trusted, usually with success, to instinct. Yet she was conscious of the provincialism of Victorian sentiment, even while she was loyal to it. " I know," she wrote, " there is an utterly astounding and complicated something gathering which is quite too strong and direct for people like me, who were brought up in narrower times, to grasp or understand." But the essential modesty of such an admission is perhaps the reason why her Victorianism, if it dissatisfies, never jars. There was no self-indulgence in her senti- , ment, no arrogance in her loyalty, and no complacence in her ' humanitarianism, from the time when as a child she founded a society for " the stoppation of starvation " all the world over, to that when she wrote : " It comes over one with a sort of shock to think of the horrible tortures we civilized nations inflict . . . when I heard Mr. — and Mrs. — shouting out for war the other night, I felt I could have knocked their stupid heads together. War is so different from fighting and shouting from either." And that was written in 1870.
This book,then, is to be treasured,not for the rather tenuous Victorian reminiscences which it contains, but as the expression of a very gentle, radiant and courageous spirit. And because Lady Ritchie loved life without ever exacting anything, she never grew old. " Who says ` Youth's a stuff will not endure ' Y " she wrote a month before her death. " It lasts as long as we do, and is older than age. For those moments of eager life of seeing and being come back to us, and we babble of green fields and live among them to the very end."
HUGH I'A. FAUSSET.
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