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[Notes:

8: Thackeray heartily disliked Swift, and said so. “As for Swift, you haven’t made me alter my opinion”–he replied to Hannay’s remonstrances. This feeling was intensified by the belief that Swift, as a clergyman, was insincere. “Of course,”–he wrote in September, 1851, in a letter now in the British Museum,–“any man is welcome to believe as he likes for me except a parson; and I can’t help looking upon Swift and Sterne as a couple of traitors and renegades … with a scornful pity for them in spite of all their genius and greatness.”

9: Some XVIII. Century Men of Letters, 1902, i. 187. The intention was never carried out. In The King over the Water, 1908, Miss A. Shield and Mr. Andrew Lang have recently examined another portrait in Esmond,–that of the Chevalier de St. George,–not without injury to its historical veracity. In these matters, Mr. Lang–like Rob Roy–is on his native heath; and it is only necessary to refer the reader to this highly interesting study.]

But although, with our rectified information, we may except against the picture of Steele as a man, we can scarcely cavil at the reproduction of his manner as a writer. Even when Thackeray was a boy at Charterhouse, his imitative faculty had been exceptional; and he displayed it triumphantly in his maturity by those Novels by Eminent Hands in which the authors chosen are at once caricatured and criticised. The thing is more than the gift of parody; it amounts (as Mr. Frederic Harrison has rightly said) to positive forgery. It is present in all his works, in stray letters and detached passages.

In its simplest form it is to be found in the stiff, circumstantial report of the seconds in the duel at Boulogne in Denis Duval; and in the missive in barbarous French of the Dowager Viscountess Castlewood[10]–a letter which only requires the sprawling, childish script to make it an exact facsimile of one of the epistolary efforts of that “baby-faced” Caroline beauty who was accustomed to sign herself “L duchesse de Portsmout.” It is better still in the letter from Walpole to General Conway in chap. xl. of The Virginians, which is perfect, even to the indifferent pun of sleepy (and overrated) George Selwyn. But the crown and top of these pastiches is certainly the delightful paper, which pretends to be No. 341 of the Spectator for All Fools’ Day, 1712, in which Colonel Esmond treats “Mistress Jocasta-Beatrix,” to what, in the parlance of the time, was decidedly a “bite.”[11] Here Thackeray has borrowed not only Steele’s voice, but his very trick of speech. It is, however, a fresh instance of the “tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive,” that although this pseudo- Spectator is stated to have been printed “exactly as those famous journals were printed” for eighteenth-century breakfast-tables, it could hardly, owing to one microscopic detail, have deceived the contemporary elect. For Mr, Esmond, to his very apposite Latin epigraph, unluckily appended an English translation,–a concession to the country gentlemen from which both Addison and Steele deliberately abstained, holding that their distinctive mottoes were (in Addison’s own phrase) “words to the wise,” of no concern to unlearned persons.[12]

Notes:

[10] Esmond, Book ii, chap, ii.

[11] Ib. Book iii, chap, iii.

[12] Spectator, No. 221, November 13, 1711.

This very minute trifle emphasises the pitfalls of would-be perfect imitation. But it also serves to bring us finally to the vocabulary of Esmond. As to this, extravagant pretensions have sometimes been advanced. It has been asserted, for instance, by a high journalistic authority, that “no man, woman, or child in Esmond, ever says anything that he or she might not have said in the reign of Queen Anne.” This is one of those extreme utterances in which enthusiasm, losing its head, invites contradiction. Thackeray professedly “copied the language of Queen Anne,”–he says so in his dedication to Lord Ashburton; but he himself would certainly never have put forward so comprehensive a claim as the above. There is no doubt a story that he challenged Mr. Lowell (who was his fellow-passenger to America on the Canada ) to point out in Esmond a word which had not been used in the early eighteenth century; and that the author of The Biglow Papers promptly discovered such a word. But even if the anecdote be not well-invented, the invitation must have been more jest than earnest. For none knew better than Thackeray that these barren triumphs of wording belong to ingenuity rather than genius, being exercises altogether in the taste of the Persian poet who left out all the A’s (as well as the poetry) in his verses, or of that other French funambulist whose sonnet in honour of Anne de Montaut was an acrostic, a mesostic, a St. Andrew’s Cross, a lozenge,–everything, in short, but a sonnet. What Thackeray endeavoured after when “copying the language of Queen Anne,” and succeeded in attaining, was the spirit and tone of the time. It was not pedantic philology at which he aimed, though he did not disdain occasional picturesque archaisms, such as “yatches” for “yachts,” or despise the artful aid of terminal k’s, long s’s, and old-cut type. Consequently, as was years ago pointed out by Fitzedward Hall (whose manifest prejudice against Thackeray as a writer should not blind us in a matter of fact), it is not difficult to detect many expressions in the memoirs of Queen Anne’s Colonel which could never have been employed until Her Majesty had long been “quietly inurned.” What is more,–if we mistake not,–the author of Esmond sometimes refrained from using an actual eighteenth-century word, even in a quotation, when his instinct told him it was not expedient to do so. In the original of that well-known anecdote of Steele beside his father’s coffin, In Tatler No. 181, reproduced in book i. chap. vi. of the novel, Steele says, “My mother catched me in her arms.” “Catched” is good enough eighteenth-century for Johnson and Walpole. But Thackeray made it “caught,” and “caught” it remains to this day both in Esmond and The Humourists.