Chapter IV

No: I am not talking fantastically at all. Let us be sober-serious, corrugating our brows upon history: and at once see that these Cambridge men of Thackeray’s generation--FitzGerald (to whom he was “old Thack”), Tennyson, Brookfield, Monckton Milnes, Kinglake--all with the exception of Arthur Hallam (whom I sadly suspect to have been something of a prig) cultivated high fooling and carried it to the nth power as a fine art. Life, in that Victorian era of peace between wars, was no lull of lotus-eating for them--the England of Carlyle, Newman, Ruskin admitted no lull of the young mind--but a high-spirited hilarious game. As one of them, Milnes, wrote of “The Men of Old”:

They went about their gravest deeds
As noble boys at play.

A plenty of English writers--some of them accounted highly serious writers--had indulged in what I may call similar “larks” before them. Swift, for example, has a glorious sense of the high-nonsensical; Cowper has it, of course. I regret to say that I even suspect Crabbe. Canning had it--take, for example, a single stage-direction in _The Rovers_:

Several soldiers cross the stage wearily, as if returning from the
Thirty Years’ War.

Lamb of course had it; and in his letters will carry it to a _delirium in excelsis_. But this Cambridge group would seem to have shared and practised it as a form, an exercise, in their free-masonry. Take for a single instance James Spedding’s forehead. James Spedding, afterwards learned editor of Bacon, and a butt in that profane set, had a brow severe and high, of the sort (you know) that tells of moral virtue with just a hint of premature baldness. It was very smooth; it rose to a scalp all but conical. His admiring friends elected to call it Alpine. Now hear FitzGerald upon it, in a letter:

That portrait of Spedding, for instance, which Lawrence has given
me: not swords, nor cannon, nor all the Bulls of Bashan butting
at it, could, I feel sure, discompose that venerable forehead. No
wonder that no hair can grow at such an altitude: no wonder his
view of Bacon’s virtue is so rarefied that the common consciences
of men cannot endure it. Thackeray and I occasionally amuse
ourselves with the idea of Spedding’s forehead: we find it somehow
or other in all things, just peering out of all things: you see it
in a milestone, Thackeray says. He also draws the forehead rising
with a sober light over Mont Blanc, and reflected in the lake of
Geneva. The forehead is at present in Pembrokeshire, I believe: or
Glamorganshire: or Monmouthshire: it is hard to say which. It has
gone to spend its Christmas there.

And later, May 22, 1842:

You have of course read the account of Spedding’s forehead landing
in America. English sailors hail it in the Channel, mistaking it
for Beachy Head.

I have quoted this just to enforce my argument that, to understand Thackeray’s work, you must understand just what kind of a man he was in his upbringing and the way of his early friendships. And when I add that his gift for nursery folly was expended upon a widowed and desolate home--on a home from which his heart drove him to flee, no matter how ambitiously he rebuilt and adorned it, to scribble his novels on Club paper or in hotels, you may get (I hope) a little closer to understanding his generous, but bitter and always sad heart.