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Note:

[6] Mr. Clement Shorter’s Charlotte Bronte and her Circle, 1896, p. 403; and Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronte, 1900, pp. 561 et seq.

One of the points on which Miss Bronte does not touch,–at all events does not touch in those portions of her correspondence which have been printed,–is the marriage with which Esmond closes. Upon this event it would have been highly instructive to have had her views, especially as it appears to have greatly exercised her contemporaries, the first reviewers. It was the gravamen of the Times indictment; to the critic of Fraser it was highly objectionable; and the Examiner regarded it as “incredible.” Why it was “incredible” that a man should marry a woman seven years older than himself, to whom he had already proposed once in vol. ii., and of whose youthful appearance we are continually reminded (“she looks the sister of her daughter” says the old Dowager at Chelsea), is certainly not superficially obvious. Nor was it obvious to Lady Castlewood’s children, “Mother’s in love with you,–yes, I think mother’s in love with you,” says downright Frank Esmond; the only impediment in his eyes being the bar sinister, as yet unremoved. And Miss Beatrix herself, in vol. iii., is even more roundly explicit. “As for you,” she tells Esmond, “you want a woman to bring your slippers and cap, and to sit at your feet, and cry ‘O caro! O bravo!’ whilst you read your Shakespeares, and Miltons, and stuff” [which shows that she herself had read Swift’s Grand Question Debated ]. “Mamma would have been the wife for you, had you been a little older, though you look ten years older than she does,” “You do, you glum-faced, blue-bearded, little old man!” adds this very imperious and free-spoken young lady. The situation is, no doubt, at times extremely difficult, and naturally requires consummate skill in the treatment. But if these things and others signify anything to an intelligent reader, they signify that the author, if he had not his end steadily in view, knew perfectly well that his story was tending in one direction. There will probably always be some diversity of opinion in the matter; but the majority of us have accepted Thackeray’s solution, and have dropped out of sight that hint of undesirable rivalry, which so troubled the precisians of the early Victorian age. To those who read Esmond now, noting carefully the almost imperceptible transformation of the motives on either side, as developed by the evolution of the story, the union of the hero and heroine at the end must appear not only credible but preordained. And that the gradual progress towards this foregone conclusion is handled with unfailing tact and skill, there can surely be no question.[7]

[Note:

7: Thackeray’s own explanation was more characteristic than convincing. “Why did you”–said once to him impetuous Mrs. John Brown of Edinburgh–“Why did you make Esmond marry that old woman?” “My dear lady,” he replied, “it was not I who married them. They married themselves.” (Dr. John Brmon, by the late John Taylor Brown, 1903, pp. 96-7.)]

Of the historical portraits in the book, the interest has, perhaps, at this date, a little paled. Not that they are one whit less vigorously alive than when the author first put them in motion; but they have suffered from the very attention which Esmond and The Humourists have directed to the study of the originals. The picture of Marlborough is still as effective as when it was first proclaimed to be good enough for the brush of Saint-Simon. But Thackeray himself confessed to a family prejudice against the hero of Blenheim, and later artists have considerably readjusted the likeness. Nor in all probability would the latest biographer of Bolingbroke endorse that presentment. In the purely literary figures, Thackeray naturally followed the Lectures, and is consequently open to the same criticisms as have been offered on those performances. The Swift of The Humourists, modelled on Macaulay, was never accepted from the first; and it has not been accepted in the novel, or by subsequent writers from Forster onwards.[8] Addison has been less studied; and his likeness has consequently been less questioned. Concerning Steele there has been rather more discussion. That Thackeray’s sketch is very vivid, very human, and in most essentials, hard to disprove, must be granted. But it is obviously conceived under the domination of the “poor Dick” of Addison, and dwells far too persistently upon Steele’s frailer and more fallible aspect. No one would believe that the flushed personage in the full-bottomed periwig, who hiccups Addison’s Campaign in the Haymarket garret, or the fuddled victim of “Prue’s” curtain lecture at Hampton, ranked, at the date of the story, far higher than Addison as a writer, and that he was, in spite of his faults, not only a kindly gentleman and scholar, but a philanthropist, a staunch patriot, and a consistent politician. Probably the author of Esmond considered that, in a mixed character, to be introduced incidentally, and exhibited naturally “in the quotidian undress and relaxation of his mind” (as Lamb says), anything like biographical big drum should be deprecated. This is, at least, the impression left on us by an anecdote told by Elwin. He says that Thackeray, talking to him once about The Virginians, which was then appearing, announced that he meant, among other people, to bring in Goldsmith, “representing him as he really was, a little, shabby, mean, shuffling Irishman.” These are given as Thackeray’s actual words. If so, they do not show the side of Goldsmith which is shown in the last lecture of The Humourists. [9]