Roundabout Papers - Penn State University

Thackeraycoached through the famous “Faust” of Goethe (thouwert my instructor, good old Weissenborn, and theseeyes beheld the great master himself in dear little Weimartown!) has read those charming verses which are prefixedto the drama, in which the poet reverts to thetime when his work was first composed, and recalls thefriends now departed, who once listened to his song.The dear shadows rise up around him, he says; he livesin the past again. It is to-day which appears vague andvisionary. We humbler writers cannot create Fausts, orraise up monumental works that shall endure for allages; but our books are diaries, in which our own feelingsmust of necessity be set down. As we look to thepage written last month, or ten years ago, we rememberthe day and its events; the child ill, mayhap, in theadjoining room, and the doubts and fears which rackedthe brain as it still pursued its work; the dear old friendwho read the commencement of the tale, and whosegentle hand shall be laid in ours no more. I own for mypart that, in reading pages which this hand pennedformerly, I often lose sight of the text under my eyes. Itis not the words I see; but that past day; that bygonepage of life’s history; that tragedy, comedy it may be,which our little home company was enacting; that merrymakingwhich we shared; that funeral which we followed;that bitter, bitter grief which we buried.And, such being the state of my mind, I pray gentlereaders to deal kindly with their humble servant’s manifoldshortcomings, blunders, and slips of memory. Assure as I read a page of my own composition, I find afault or two, half a dozen. Jones is called Brown. Brown,who is dead, is brought to life. Aghast, and monthsafter the number was printed, I saw that I had calledPhilip Firmin, Clive Newcome. Now Clive Newcome is thehero of another story by the reader’s most obedientwriter. The two men are as different, in my mind’s eye,as—as Lord Palmerston and Mr. Disraeli let us say. Butthere is that blunder at page 990, line 76, volume 84 ofthe Cornhill Magazine, and it is past mending; and Iwish in my life I had made no worse blunders or errorsthan that which is hereby acknowledged.Another Finis written. Another mile-stone passed on237