During his minority young Beckford's mother, who was a granddaughter of the sixth Earl of Abercorn, placed him under a private tutor.He was taught music by Mozart; and the Earl of Chatham, who had been his father's friend, thought him so fanciful a boy--"all air and fire"--that he advised his mother to keep the Arabian Nights out of his way.Happily she could not, for Vathek adds the thousand and second to the thousand and one tales, with the difference that it joins to wild inventions in the spirit of the East touches of playful extravagance that could come only from an English humourist who sometimes laughed at his own tale, and did not mind turning its comic side to the reader.The younger William Beckford had been born at his father's seat in Wiltshire, Fonthill Abbey; and at seventeen amused himself with a caricature "History of Extraordinary Painters," encouraging the house-keeper of Fonthill to show the pictures to visitors as works of Og of Basan and other worthies in her usual edifying manner.
Young Beckford's education was continued for a year and a half at Geneva.He then travelled in Italy and the Low Countries, and it was at this time that he amused himself by writing, at the age of about twenty- two, "Vathek" in French, at a single sitting; but he gave his mind to it and the sitting lasted three days and two nights.An English version of it was made by a stranger, and published without permission in 1784.Beckford himself published his tale at Paris and Lausanne in 1787, one year after the death of a wife to whom he had been three years married, and who left him with two daughters.
Beckford went to Portugal and Spain; returned to France, and was present at the storming of the Bastille.He was often abroad; he bought Gibbon's library at Lausanne, and shut himself up with it for a time,having a notion of reading it through.He was occasionally in Parliament, but did not care for that kind of amusement.He wrote pieces of less enduring interest than "Vathek," including two burlesques upon the sentimental novel of his time.In 1796 he settled down at Fonthill, and began to spend there abundantly on building and rebuilding.Perhaps he thought of Vathek's tower when he employed workmen day and night to build a tower for himself three hundred feet high, and set them to begin it again when it fell down.He is said to have spent upon Fonthill a quarter of a million, living there in much seclusion during the last twenty years of his life.He died in 1844.
The happy thought of this William Beckford's life was "Vathek."It is a story that paints neither man nor outward nature as they are, but reproduces with happy vivacity the luxuriant imagery and wild incidents of an Arabian tale.There is a ghost of a moral in the story of a sensual Caliph going to the bad, as represented by his final introduction to the Halls of Eblis.But the enjoyment given by the book reflects the real enjoyment that the author had in writing it--enjoyment great enough to cause it to be written at a heat, in one long sitting, without flagging power.Young and lively, he delivered himself up to a free run of fancy, revelled in the piled-up enormities of the Wicked Mother, who had not brought up Vathek properly, and certainly wrote some parts of his nightmare tale as merrily as if he were designing matter for a pantomime.
Whoever, in reading "Vathek," takes it altogether seriously, does not read it as it was written.We must have an eye for the vein of caricature that now and then comes to the surface, and invites a laugh without disturbing the sense of Eastern extravagance bent seriously upon the elaboration of a tale crowded with incident and action.Taken altogether seriously, the book has faults of construction.But the faults turn into beauties when we catch the twinkle in the writer's eye.
H.M.
