The Atlantic Monthly, page 199 by Various Authors
<< Return to Title Details & Download200
e measure of his permanent fame. The niche wherein he shall henceforth stand was chiselled while he lived. One by one the doubters confessed their reluctant faith, unfriendly critics dropped their blunted steel, and no man dared to deny him the place which was his, and his only, by right of genius.
In one sense, however, he was misunderstood by the world, and he has died before that profounder recognition which he craved had time to mature. All the breadth and certainty of his fame failed to compensate him for the lack of this: the man's heart coveted that justice which was accorded only to the author's brain. Other pens may sum up the literary record he has left behind: I claim the right of a friend who knew and loved him to speak of him as a man. The testimony, which, while living, he was too proud to have desired, may now be laid reverently upon his grave.
There is a delicacy to be observed in describing one's intercourse with a departed great man, since death does not wholly remove that privacy which it is our duty to respect in life. Yet the veil which we charitably drop upon weakness or dishonor may surely be lifted to disclose the opposite qualities. I shall repeat no word of Thackeray's which he would have wished unsaid or suppressed: I shall say no more than he would himself have said of a contemporary to whom the world had not done full justice. During a friendship of nearly seven years, he permitted me to see that one true side of an author's nature which is never so far revealed to the public that the malignant may avail themselves of his candor to assail or the fools to annoy him. He is now beyond the reach of malice, obtrusive sentiment, or vain curiosity; and the "late remorse of love," which a better knowledge of the man may here and there provoke, can atone for past wrong only by that considerate, tender judgment of the living of which he was an example.
I made Thackeray's acquaintance in New York towards the close of the year 1855. With the first grasp of his broad han