“SINCE the author of ‘Tom Jones’ was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to the utmost of his power a MAN. We must drape him and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art. Many ladies have remonstrated and subscribers left me, because, in the course of the story, I described a young man resisting and affected by temptation. My object was to say, that he had the passions to feel, and the manliness and generosity to overcome them. You will not hear—it is best to know it—what

moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms, what is the life and talk of your sons. A little more frankness than is customary has been attempted in this story; with no bad desire on the writer’s part, it is hoped, and with no ill-consequence to any reader. If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best, from whatever chair—from those whence graver writers or thinkers argue, as from that at which the story-teller sits as he concludes his labour, and bids his kind reader farewell.” So runs a passage in the preface to “Pendennis.”

“If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best.”

There, in a sentence, is the secret underlying all Thackeray’s work. The novelist is inclined to portray the men and women of fiction rather than the men and women of life. This fault of his weaker brethren of the quill Thackeray avoided. His characters are always human. There are no immaculate heroes, no perfect heroines, no utterly unredeemed scoundrels of either sex to be met with in the pages of his books. He conceived it to be his duty to describe the world as he saw it, and to draw the men and women he knew. If he has nowhere joined pure goodness to pure intelligence, if he has not bestowed on any woman the humour of Becky Sharp and the simplicity of Amelia Sedley, it is because he had never met this union of forces in life. To have described the unreal and passed it off as the real would have been an offence against the pen which was able to boast:

“I cannot help telling the truth as I view it, and describing what I see. To describe it otherwise than it seems to me would be falsehood in that calling in which it has pleased Heaven to place me; treason to that conscience which says that men are weak; that truth must be told; that faults must be owned; that pardon must be prayed for; and that Love reigns supreme over all.” This is Thackeray’s confession of literary faith.

“My object is not to make a perfect character of anything like it,” he wrote to his mother when “Vanity Fair” was appearing in monthly parts. “Our friend is not Amadis or Sir Charles Grandison,” he wrote of Philip Firmin, “and I don’t for a moment set him up as a person to be revered or imitated, but try to draw him faithfully as Nature made him.”

The late Anthony Trollope stigmatised Thackeray as an unmethodical writer. Certainly the great man, as author, bound himself by no hard and fast rules. His plan was to create mentally two or three of his chief characters and write from page to page, with only a general notion of the course he would be taking a few chapters later. But then to compensate for the lack of method he lived with his characters, shared their joys and sorrows, and spoke of them as if they were real creatures of flesh and blood. “Being entirely occupied with my two new friends, Mrs. Pendennis and

her son Arthur Pendennis,” he wrote to Mrs. Brookfield from Brighton in 1849, “I got up very early again this morning. He is a very good-natured, generous young fellow, and I begin to like him considerably. I wonder if he is interesting to me from selfish reasons, and because I fancy we resemble each other in many parts.” “I wonder what will happen to Pendennis and Fanny Bolton,” he remarked in another letter to the same correspondent; “writing and sending it to you, somehow it seems as if it were true.” Mrs. Ritchie remembers entering her father’s study one morning about two years later and being motioned away, and how, an hour later, he went to the school-room and, half-laughing, half-ashamed, said: “I do not know what James can have thought of me when he came in with the tax-gatherer after you left, and found me blubbering over Helen Pendennis’s death.”

“I don’t control my characters,” he asserted one day. “I am in their hands, and they take me where they please.” And when a friend remonstrated with him for having made Esmond marry “his mother-in-law,” he only replied: “I didn’t make him do it; they did it themselves.” It may be because the characters were so real to the creator that they live in the memory of the reader. If Thackeray was the first to shed tears over the death of Helen, certainly he has not been the last. Who can read with dry eyes of the reconciliation of mother and son at the death-bed? “As they were talking the clock struck nine, and Helen reminded him how, when he was a little boy, she used to go up to his bed-room at that hour and hear him say Our Father. And once more, oh once more, the young man fell down at his mother’s sacred knees, and sobbed out the prayer which the Divine Tenderness uttered for us, and which has been echoed for twenty ages since by millions of sinful and humble men. And as he spoke the last words of the supplication, the mother’s head fell down on her boy’s, and her arms closed around him, and together they repeated the words ‘for ever and ever’ and ‘Amen.’”

Readers of Thackeray’s works must have noticed how frequently the characters reappear in tales other than that in which they are first introduced. Reference is made to them and to their doings in book after book, until we feel that we know them personally. Thackeray loved to reintroduce his old friends, and it was his intention—frustrated by an all too early death to write a novel of the times of Henry V., in which the ancestors of his Pendennises and Warringtons should have foregathered. A long and fascinating article might be written tracing the subsequent careers of the characters from the glances we obtain of them at odd moments.

How many novelists are there who have such a gallery of characters as can be collected from Thackeray’s books? What admirable realism! What marvellous insight into the natures of men and women!

In his earlier years, however, he was too bitter, and his stories contain far too many scoundrels. “I don’t know where I get all these rascals for my books,” he said apologetically: “I have certainly never lived with such people.” “The Yellowplush Correspondence” does not contain a single man or woman we should like to meet. Yellowplush is a scamp; Dawkins is silly and snobbish; Blewitt, the cardsharper, is a bully and a fool; Lady Griffin is not pleasant, and though she is badly treated, her revenge is too cruel; the Earl of Crabs—the creation of a master hand—is a terrible man, whose sense of humour only makes him more dangerous; and Deuceace himself, cardsharper, swindler, fortune-hunter ... yet with such a father what was he to become? The foolish Mathilda demands some pity; for at least she is loyal to the man who married her only because he thought she had money: “My Lord, my place is with him.”

Who will record the unwritten chapters of the life of the Honourable Algernon Percy Deuceace? There is plenty of material, if not for authentic history, at least for legitimate speculation.

It is known that at Lord Bagwig’s the Honourable Algie won from young Tom Rook the sum of thirty pounds; that with his friend Mr. Ringwood (who, with the invaluable assistance of his hostess, trapped the commercial traveller, Pogson, into the signing of bills for huge amounts at the house of Madame la Baronne de Florval-Delval, nÉe de Melval-Norval) he won heavily at the card-table from Mr. Vanjohn; and that with Blundell-Blundell (who was up at Oxford with Arthur Pendennis) he contrived to swindle Colonel Altamont. Then there is the paragraph in “Galignani’s Messenger,” quoted in the last chapter of “A Shabby Genteel Story”: “Married at the British Embassy, by Bishop Luxcombe, Andrew Fitch, Esq., to Marianne Caroline Matilda, widow of the late Antony Carrickfergus, of Lombard Street, and Gloucester Place, Esquire.... Miss Runt officiated as bridesmaid; and we remarked among the company Earl and Countess Crabs, General Sir Rice Curry, K.C.B., Colonel Wapshot, Sir Charles Swang, the Hon. Algernon Percy Deuceace and his lady, Count Punter, and others of the Élite of the fashionables now in Paris. The bridegroom was attended by his friend Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esq., and the lady was given away by the Right Hon. the Earl of Crabs....” Had the Hon. Mrs. Deuceace forgiven her husband the blow in the Bois, with the account of which the adventure of Mr. Deuceace at Paris concluded? Was the younger couple reconciled to the elder? and if so, by what means? As the author does not solve the problem, each reader must do so for himself.

“Catherine,” a satire upon the “Newgate Novels,” naturally contains a collection of jail-birds; and these, of course, are not treated as they would have been by Ainsworth or Bulwer Lytton, but are shown in all their hideousness. “A Shabby Genteel Story” is a very fine piece of work, but its theme is unpleasant—the trapping into a mock marriage of trusting Cinderella—and the characters objectionable: Mr. and Mrs. Gann and the Misses Macarty; Brandon, Tufthunt, and Cinqbars. Fitch is the one honest person, save the heroine, and he is vulgar. Tufthunt is, perhaps, the worst man Thackeray ever depicted, for Sir Francis Clavering is weak rather than vile, and Brandon—the Dr. Firmin of “Philip”—suffers from a moral sense so perverted that he cannot realise his own weakness.

The rascal Fitz-Boodle is a humorist of the first water. His iniquity was the writing of those scandalous chronicles of his friends’ private lives, “Men’s Wives,” which tell of the scoundrel Walker, the blackguard Boroski, and the selfish, vain, and terribly vulgar Mrs. Dennis Haggarty. The stories of “Dorothea” and “Ottilia,” however, are agreeable enough. Even “Barry Lyndon,” one of the author’s masterpieces, is a disagreeable story. This, indeed, Thackeray fully realised. “You need not read it,” he said to his eldest daughter; “you would not like it.” The villain Barry, who never realises that he is not a hero, and his foolish wife, are only in part counterbalanced by Barry’s vulgar, loving mother, who goes to him in the day of his ruin and nurses him until he dies of delirium tremens in the nineteenth year of his residence in the Fleet prison.

After “Barry Lyndon” appeared “Vanity Fair,” “Pendennis,” “The Newcomes,” “Esmond,” and “The Virginians,” which contain so vast a number of characters that it is impossible to treat of them one by one.

“Wherever shines the sun, you are sure to find Folly basking in it. Knavery is the shadow at Folly’s heels,” Thackeray wrote in the character sketch of “Captain Rook and Mr. Pigeon.” It seems as if he had not quite grasped the fact that there were other things than folly and knavery to write about, and that a surfeit of rogues has an unpleasant after-effect. “Oh! for a little manly, honest. God-relying simplicity, cheerful, affected, and humble!” he had prayed in one of his earliest reviews; but it was only with “Vanity Fair” that he began to give it.

It has been stated by more than one critic that Thackeray could not depict a good woman, and that those that were without blemish were also without any attractive qualities. Yet Helen Pendennis was a good woman, a good wife, and a good mother; and Laura Bell was clever as well as good; and certainly Ethel Newcome was not a fool; nor Theo and Kitty Lambert other than good and true women.

From a Photograph