Miscellaneous Prose

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MISCELLANEOUS PROSE

By George Meredith

CONTENTS:

INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES"

A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE.

CONCESSION TO THE CELT.

LESLIE STEPHEN.

LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE 'MORNING POST' FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY.

INTRODUCTION TO W. M. THACKERAY'S "THE FOUR GEORGES"

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY was born at Calcutta, July 18, 1811, the only
child of Richmond and Anne Thackeray. He received the main part of his
education at the Charterhouse, as we know to our profit. Thence he
passed to Cambridge, remaining there from February 1829 to sometime in
1830. To judge by quotations and allusions, his favourite of the
classics was Horace, the chosen of the eighteenth century, and generally
the voice of its philosophy in a prosperous country. His voyage from
India gave him sight of Napoleon on the rocky island. In his young
manhood he made his bow reverentially to Goethe of Weimar; which did not
check his hand from setting its mark on the sickliness of Werther.

He was built of an extremely impressionable nature and a commanding good
sense. He was in addition a calm observer, having 'the harvest of a
quiet eye.' Of this combination with the flood of subjects brought up to
judgement in his mind, came the prevalent humour, the enforced
disposition to satire, the singular critical drollery, notable in his
works. His parodies, even those pushed to burlesque, are an expression
of criticism and are more effective than the serious method, while they
rarely overstep the line of justness. The Novels by Eminent Hands do not
pervert the originals they exaggerate. 'Sieyes an abbe, now a ferocious
lifeguardsman,' stretches the face of the rollicking Irish novelist
without disfeaturing him; and the mysterious visitor to the palatial
mansion in Holywell Street indicates possibilities in the Oriental
imagination of the eminent statesman who stooped to conquer fact through
fiction. Thackeray's attitude in his great novels is that of the
composedly urbane lecturer, on a level with a select audience, assured of
interesting, above requirements to excite. The slow movement of the
narrative has a grace of style to charm like the dance of the Minuet de
la Cour: it is the limpidity of Addison flavoured with salt of a racy
vernacular; and such is the veri-similitude and the dialogue that they
might seem to be heard from the mouths of living speakers. When in this
way the characters of Vanity Fair had come to growth, their author was
rightly appreciated as one of the creators in our literature, he took at
once the place he will retain. With this great book and with Esmond and
The Newcomes, he gave a name eminent, singular, and beloved to English
fiction.

Charges of cynicism are common against all satirists, Thackeray had to
bear with them. The social world he looked at did not show him heroes,
only here and there a plain good soul to whom he was affectionate in the
unhysterical way of an English father patting a son on the head. He
described his world as an accurate observer saw it, he could not be
dishonest. Not a page of his books reveals malevolence or a sneer at
humanity. He was driven to the satirical task by the scenes about him.
There must be the moralist in the satirist if satire is to strike. The
stroke is weakened and art violated when he comes to the front. But he
will always be pressing forward, and Thackeray restrained him as much as
could be done, in the manner of a good-humoured constable. Thackeray may
have appeared cynical to the devout by keeping him from a station in the
pulpit among congregations of the many convicted sinners. That the
moralist would have occupied it and thundered had he presented us with
the Fourth of the Georges we see when we read of his rejecting the
solicitations of so seductive a personage for the satiric rod.

Himself one of the manliest, the kindliest of human creatures, it was the
love of his art that exposed him to misinterpretation. He did stout
service in his day. If the bad manners he scourged are now lessened to
some degree we pay a debt in remembering that we owe much to him, and if
what appears incurable remains with us, a continued reading of his works
will at least help to combat it.

A PAUSE IN THE STRIFE--1886

Our 'Eriniad,' or ballad epic of the enfranchisement of the sister island
is closing its first fytte for the singer, and with such result as those
Englishmen who have some knowledge of their fellows foresaw. There are
sufficient reasons why the Tories should always be able to keep together,
but let them have the credit of cohesiveness and subordination to
control. Though working for their own ends, they won the esteem of their
allies, which will count for them in the struggles to follow. Their
leaders appear to have seen what has not been distinctly perceptible to
the opposite party--that the break up of the Liberals means the defection
of the old Whigs in permanence, heralding the establishment of a powerful
force against Radicalism, with a capital cry to the country. They have
tactical astuteness. If they seem rather too proud of their victory, it
is merely because, as becomes them, they do not look ahead. To rejoice
in the gaining of a day, without having clear views of the morrow, is
puerile enough. Any Tory victory, it may be said, is little more than a
pause in the strife, unless when the Radical game is played 'to dish the
Whigs,' and the Tories are now fast bound down by their incorporation of
the latter to abstain from the violent springs and right-about-facings of
the Derby-Disraeli period. They are so heavily weighted by the new
combination that their Jack-in-the-box, Lord Randolph, will have to stand
like an ordinary sentinel on duty, and take the measurement of his
natural size. They must, on the supposition of their entry into office,
even to satisfy their own constituents, produce a scheme. Their majority
in the House will command it.

To this extent, then, Mr. Gladstone has not been defeated. The question
set on fire by him will never be extinguished until the combustible
matter has gone to ashes. But personally he meets a sharp rebuff. The
Tories may well raise hurrahs over that. Radicals have to admit it, and
point to the grounds of it. Between a man's enemies and his friends
there comes out a rough painting of his character, not without a
resemblance to the final summary, albeit wanting in the justly delicate
historical touch to particular features. On the one side he is abused as
'the one-man power'; lauded on the other for his marvellous intuition of
the popular will. One can believe that he scarcely wishes to march
dictatorially, and full surely his Egyptian policy was from step to step
a misreading of the will of the English people. He went forth on this
campaign, with the finger of Egypt not ineffectively levelled against him
a second time. Nevertheless he does read his English; he has, too, the
fatal tendency to the bringing forth of Bills in the manner of Jove big
with Minerva. He perceived the necessity, and the issue of the
necessity; clearly defined what must come, and, with a higher motive than
the vanity with which his enemies charge him, though not with such high
counsel as Wisdom at his ear, fell to work on it alone, produced the
whole Bill alone, and then handed it to his Cabinet to digest, too much
in love with the thing he had laid and incubated to permit of any serious
dismemberment of its frame. Hence the disruption. He worked for the
future, produced a Bill for the future, and is wrecked in the present.
Probably he can work in no other way than from the impulse of his
enthusiasm, solitarily. It is a way of making men overweeningly in love
with their creations. The consequence is likely to be that Ireland will
get her full measure of justice to appease her cravings earlier than she
would have had as much from the United Liberal Cabinet, but at a cost
both to her and to England. Meanwhile we are to have a House of Commons
incapable of conducting public business; the tradesmen to whom the Times
addressed pathetic condolences on the loss of their season will lose more
than one; and we shall be made sensible that we have an enemy in our
midst, until a people, slow to think, have taken counsel of their native
generosity to put trust in the most generous race on earth.

CONCESSION TO THE CELT--1886

Things are quiet outside an ant-hill until the stick has been thrust into
it. Mr. Gladstone's Bill for helping to the wiser government of Ireland
has brought forth our busy citizens on the top-rubble in traversing
counterswarms, and whatever may be said against a Bill that deals roughly
with many sensitive interests, one asks whether anything less violently
impressive would have roused industrious England to take this question at
last into the mind, as a matter for settlement. The Liberal leader has
driven it home; and wantonly, in the way of a pedestrian demagogue, some
think; certainly to the discomposure of the comfortable and the myopely
busy, who prefer to live on with a disease in the frame rather than at
all be stirred. They can, we see, pronounce a positive electoral
negative; yet even they, after the eighty and odd years of our domestic
perplexity, in the presence of the eighty and odd members pledged for
Home Rule, have been moved to excited inquiries regarding measures--short
of the obnoxious Bill. How much we suffer from sniffing the vain incense
of that word practical, is contempt of prevision! Many of the measures
now being proposed responsively to the fretful cry for them, as a better
alternative to correction by force of arms, are sound and just. Ten
years back, or at a more recent period before Mr. Parnell's triumph in
the number of his followers, they would have formed a basis for the
appeasement of the troubled land. The institution of county boards,
the abolition of the detested Castle, something like the establishment of
a Royal residence in Dublin, would have begun the work well. Materially
and sentimentally, they were the right steps to take. They are now
proposed too late. They are regarded as petty concessions, insufficient
and vexatious. The lower and the higher elements in the population are
fused by the enthusiasm of men who find themselves marching in full body
on a road, under a flag, at the heels of a trusted leader; and they will
no longer be fed with sops. Petty concessions are signs of weakness to
the unsatisfied; they prick an appetite, they do not close breaches. If
our object is, as we hear it said, to appease the Irish, we shall have to
give them the Parliament their leader demands. It might once have been
much less; it may be worried into a raving, perhaps a desperate
wrestling, for still more. Nations pay Sibylline prices for want of
forethought. Mr. Parnell's terms are embodied in Mr. Gladstone's Bill,
to which he and his band have subscribed. The one point for him is the
statutory Parliament, so that Ireland may civilly govern herself; and
standing before the world as representative of his country, he addresses
an applausive audience when he cites the total failure of England to do
that business of government, as at least a logical reason for the claim.
England has confessedly failed; the world says it, the country admits it.
We have failed, and not because the so-called Saxon is incapable of
understanding the Celt, but owing to our system, suitable enough to us,
of rule by Party, which puts perpetually a shifting hand upon the reins,
and invites the clamour it has to allay. The Irish--the English too in
some degree--have been taught that roaring; in its various forms, is the
trick to open the ears of Ministers. We have encouraged by irritating
them to practise it, until it has become a habit, an hereditary
profession with them. Ministers in turn have defensively adopted the
arts of beguilement, varied by an exercise of the police. We grew
accustomed to periods of Irish fever. The exhaustion ensuing we named
tranquillity, and hoped that it would bear fruit. But we did not plant.
The Party in office directed its attention to what was uppermost and
urgent--to that which kicked them. Although we were living, by common
consent; with a disease in the frame, eruptive at intervals, a national
disfigurement always a danger, the Ministerial idea of arresting it for
the purpose of healing was confined, before the passing of Mr.
Gladstone's well-meant Land Bill, to the occasional despatch of
commissions; and, in fine, we behold through History the Irish malady
treated as a form of British constitutional gout. Parliament touched on
the Irish only when the Irish were active as a virus. Our later
alternations of cajolery and repression bear painful resemblance to the
nervous fit of rickety riders compounding with their destinations that
they may keep their seats. The cajolery was foolish, if an end was in
view; the repression inefficient. To repress efficiently we have to
stifle a conscience accusing us of old injustice, and forget that we are
sworn to freedom. The cries that we have been hearing for Cromwell or
for Bismarck prove the existence of an impatient faction in our midst
fitter to wear the collars of those masters whom they invoke than to drop
a vote into the ballot-box. As for the prominent politicians who have
displaced their rivals partly on the strength of an implied approbation
of those cries, we shall see how they illumine the councils of a
governing people. They are wiser than the barking dogs. Cromwell and
Bismarck are great names; but the harrying of Ireland did not settle it,
and to Germanize a Posen and call it peace will find echo only in the
German tongue. Posen is the error of a master-mind too much given to
hammer at obstacles. He has, however, the hammer. Can it be imagined in
English hands? The braver exemplar for grappling with monstrous
political tasks is Cavour, and he would not have hinted at the iron
method or the bayonet for a pacification. Cavour challenged debate; he
had faith in the active intellect, and that is the thing to be prayed for
by statesmen who would register permanent successes. The Irish, it is
true, do not conduct an argument coolly. Mr. Parnell and his eighty-five
have not met the Conservative leader and his following in the Commons
with the gravity of platonic disputants. But they have a logical
position, equivalent to the best of arguments. They are representatives,
they would say, of a country admittedly ill-governed by us; and they have
accepted the Bill of the defeated Minister as final. Its provisions are
their terms of peace. They offer in return for that boon to take the
burden we have groaned under off our hands. If we answer that we think
them insincere, we accuse these thrice accredited representatives of the
Irish people of being hypocrites and crafty conspirators; and numbers in
England, affected by the weapons they have used to get to their present
strength, do think it; forgetful that our obtuseness to their constant
appeals forced them into the extremer shifts of agitation. Yet it will
hardly be denied that these men love Ireland; and they have not shown
themselves by their acts to be insane. To suppose them conspiring for
separation indicates a suspicion that they have neither hearts nor heads.
For Ireland, separation is immediate ruin. It would prove a very short
sail for these conspirators before the ship went down. The vital
necessity of the Union for both, countries, obviously for the weaker of
the two, is known to them; and unless we resume our exasperation of the
wild fellow the Celt can be made by such a process, we have not rational
grounds for treating him, or treating with him, as a Bedlamite. He has
besides his passions shrewd sense; and his passions may be rightly
directed by benevolent attraction. This is language derided by the
victorious enemy; it speaks nevertheless what the world, and even
troubled America, thinks of the Irish Celt. More of it now on our side
of the Channel would be serviceable. The notion that he hates the
English comes of his fevered chafing against the harness of England, and
when subject to his fevers, he is unrestrained in his cries and deeds.
That pertains to the nature of him. Of course, if we have no belief in
the virtues of friendliness and confidence--none in regard to the
Irishman--we show him his footing, and we challenge the issue. For the
sole alternative is distinct antagonism, a form of war. Mr. Gladstone's
Bill has brought us to that definite line. Ireland having given her
adhesion to it, swearing that she does so in good faith, and will not
accept a smaller quantity, peace is only to be had by our placing trust
in the Irish; we trust them or we crush them. Intermediate ways are but
the prosecution of our ugly flounderings in Bogland; and dubious as we
see the choice on either side, a decisive step to right or left will not
show us to the world so bemired, to ourselves so miserably inefficient,
as we appear in this session of a new Parliament. With his eighty-five,
apart from external operations lawful or not, Mr. Parnell can act as a
sort of lumbricus in the House. Let journalists watch and chronicle
events: if Mr. Gladstone has humour, they will yet note a peculiar smile
on his closed mouth from time to time when the alien body within the
House, from which, for the sake of its dignity and ability to conduct its
affairs, he would have relieved it till the day of a warmer intelligence
between Irish and English, paralyzes our machinery business. An ably-
handled coherent body in the midst of the liquid groups will make it felt
that Ireland is a nation, naturally dependent though she must be. We
have to do with forces in politics, and the great majority of the Irish
Nationalists in Ireland has made them a force.

No doubt Mr. Matthew Arnold is correct in his apprehensions of the
dangers we may fear from a Dublin House of Commons. The declarations
and novel or ultra theories might almost be written down beforehand.
I should, for my part, anticipate a greater danger in the familiar
attitude of the English metropolitan Press and public toward an
experiment they dislike and incline to dread:--the cynical comments,
the quotations between inverted commas, the commiserating shrug, cold
irony, raw banter, growl of menace, sharp snap, rounds of laughter.
Frenchmen of the Young Republic, not presently appreciated as offensive,
have had some of these careless trifles translated for them, and have
been stung. We favoured Germany with them now and then, before Germany
became the first power in Europe. Before America had displayed herself
as greatest among the giants that do not go to pieces, she had, as
Americans forgivingly remember, without mentioning, a series of flicks of
the whip. It is well to learn manners without having them imposed on us.
There are various ways for tripping the experiment. Nevertheless, when
the experiment is tried, considering that our welfare is involved in its
not failing, as we have failed, we should prepare to start it cordially,
cordially assist it. Thoughtful political minds regard the measure as a
backward step; yet conceiving but a prospect that a measure accepted by
Home Rulers will possibly enable the Irish and English to step together,
it seems better worth the venture than to pursue a course of prospectless
discord! Whatever we do or abstain from doing has now its evident
dangers, and this being imminent may appear the larger of them; but if
a weighing of the conditions dictates it, and conscience approves, the
wiser proceeding is to make trial of the untried. Our outlook was
preternaturally black, with enormous increase of dangers when the
originator of our species venturesomely arose from the posture of the
'quatre pattes'. We consider that we have not lost by his temerity. In
states of dubitation under impelling elements, the instinct pointing to
courageous action is, besides the manlier, conjecturably the right one.

LESLIE STEPHEN--1904

When that noble body of scholarly and cheerful pedestrians, the Sunday
Tramps, were on the march, with Leslie Stephen to lead them, there was
conversation which would have made the presence of a shorthand writer a
benefaction to the country. A pause to it came at the examination of the
leader's watch and Ordnance map under the western sun, and void was given
for the strike across country to catch the tail of a train offering
dinner in London, at the cost of a run through hedges, over ditches and
fellows, past proclamation against trespassers, under suspicion of being
taken for more serious depredators in flight. The chief of the Tramps
had a wonderful calculating eye in the observation of distances and the
nature of the land, as he proved by his discovery of untried passes in
the higher Alps, and he had no mercy for pursy followers. I have often
said of this life-long student and philosophical head that he had in him
the making of a great military captain. He would not have been opposed
to the profession of arms if he had been captured early for the service,
notwithstanding his abomination of bloodshed. He had a high, calm
courage, was unperturbed in a dubious position, and would confidently
take the way out of it which he conceived to be the better. We have not
to deplore that he was diverted from the ways of a soldier, though
England, as the country has been learning of late, cannot boast of many
in uniform who have capacity for leadership. His work in literature will
be reviewed by his lieutenant of Tramps, one of the ablest of writers!--
[Frederic W. Maitland.]--The memory of it remains with us, as being the
profoundest and the most sober criticism we have had in our time. The
only sting in it was an inoffensive humorous irony that now and then
stole out for a roll over, like a furry cub, or the occasional ripple on
a lake in grey weather. We have nothing left that is like it.

One might easily fall into the pit of panegyric by an enumeration of his
qualities, personal and literary. It would not be out of harmony with
the temper and characteristics of a mind so equable. He, the equable,
whether in condemnation or eulogy. Our loss of such a man is great, for
work was in his brain, and the hand was active till close upon the time
when his breathing ceased. The loss to his friends can be replaced only
by an imagination that conjures him up beside them. That will be no task
to those who have known him well enough to see his view of things as they
are, and revive his expression of it. With them he will live despite the
word farewell.

CORRESPONDENCE FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY

LETTERS WRITTEN TO THE MORNING POST FROM THE SEAT OF WAR IN ITALY
FROM OUR OWN CORRESPONDENT

FERRARA, June 22, 1866.

Before this letter reaches London the guns will have awakened both the
echo of the old river Po and the classical Mincio. The whole of the
troops, about 110,000 men, with which Cialdini intends to force the
passage of the first-named river are already massed along the right bank
of the Po, anxiously waiting that the last hour of to-morrow should
strike, and that the order for action should be given. The telegraph
will have already informed your readers that, according to the intimation
sent by General Lamarmora on Tuesday evening to the Austrian
headquarters, the three days fixed by the general's message before
beginning hostilities will expire at twelve p.m. of the 23rd of June.

Cialdini's headquarters have been established in this city since
Wednesday morning, and the famous general, in whom the fourth corps he
commands, and the whole of the nation, has so much confidence, has
concentrated the whole of his forces within a comparatively narrow
compass, and is ready for action. I believe therefore that by to-morrow
the right bank of the Po will be connected with the mainland of the
Polesine by several pontoon bridges, which will enable Cialdini's corps
d'armee to cross the river, and, as everybody here hopes, to cross it in
spite of any defence the Austrians may make.

On my way to this ancient city last evening I met General Cadogan and two
superior Prussian officers, who by this time must have joined Victor
Emmanuel's headquarters at Cremona; if not, they have been by this time
transferred elsewhere, more on the front, towards the line of the Mincio,
on which, according to appearance, the first, second, and third Italian
corps d'armee seem destined to operate. The English general and the two
Prussian officers above mentioned are to follow the king's staff, the
first as English commissioner, the superior in rank of the two others in
the same capacity.

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