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CHAPTER V.

PENDENNIS. THACKERAY AND THE WORLD OF

LETTERS.

MEANWHILE Thackeray had deserted Bohemia for Tyburnia or its outskirts. In other words, he had exchanged the lodging of a bachelor for a house in Kensington, and was overjoyed at his prosperity. The letters addressed about this time to Mrs Brookfield reveal an exultant happiness, tempered now and again by "blue devils," which is very agreeable to contemplate. No man ever took a keener pleasure in increased wealth and growing fame than did Thackeray, and he expresses his pleasure with an almost boyish simplicity. He frequents the houses of the great with a pride which neither Mr Pendennis nor Clive Newcome could surpass, and if it were not for the humour of the situation, whereof he was perfectly conscious, he might have afforded material for another chapter of The Book of Snobs. One day he is "to dine with the Dowager Duchess of Bedford, afterwards to Mrs Procter's, afterwards to Lady Granville's." Another

day it is the Duke of Devonshire, or Sir Robert Peel, or Lord Lansdowne who seeks his company. He is naïvely delighted when he is pointed out with the finger. "Lady C., beautiful, serene, stupid old lady," he writes; "she asked, Isn't that the great Mr Thackeray? O! my stars, think of that!" So he accepted the rôle of the great Mr Thackeray without a shred of false modesty, and exclaimed in the proper phrase of the time, “What a jaunty off-hand satiric rogue I am to be sure, and a gay young dog." He was so gay a young dog that all houses were open to him, and his attitude towards life and society is at once more amiable and just than his books suggest. He is content with good company of whatever sort it be, and after dining sumptuously at the table of a "fortunate youth," "the young men," he writes, "were clever, very frank and gentlemanlike; quite as pleasant companions as one deserves to meet, and as for your humble servant, he saw a chapter or two of Pendennis in some of them." Nor is he blind to the advantages of his social eminence. It even strikes him, as his daughter sorts the cards in the chimney-glass, "that there are people who would give their ears, or half their incomes, to go to these fine places."

Abroad, as at home, he is accorded the respect due to a great man. In Paris "the Embassy is wonderfully civil; Lord Normanby is my dearest friend," and he watches the Opera from Rothschild's box. And then he escapes from his smart friends to spend an evening

with Jules Janin, whom once he flayed in the interest of Dickens, and who now delights him. Janin tells him that he is always entirely happy, that he had never known repentance or satiety, and Thackeray sketches an enchanting portrait of him, which is very far from Balzac's bitter satire. He pictures him "bouncing about the room, gesticulating, joking, gasconading, quoting Latin, pulling out his books, which are very handsome, and tossing about his curling brown hair;

-a magnificent, jolly, intelligent face, such as would suit Pan, I should think, a flood of humorous, rich, jovial talk." In either capital he sees the best, and the best of many kinds. His catholicity, in life at least, is remarkable. He meets Sir Robert Peel at a picture-gallery, and who do you think is the next person with whom he shakes hands? Why, Mrs Rhodes, of the Back Kitchen, and perhaps he is more at his ease with her than with the great Minister. Though his preference for the world of fashion is frank enough, he lived on terms of intimacy with many of his confrères. Perhaps he was never quite happy with Dickens, but until a foolish quarrel divided them they were familiar friends, and Dickens never had a more generous admirer than Thackeray. Carlyle and Macaulay, Brookfield and FitzGerald, Tennyson and the Procters, were his loyal associates, and once in Paris he cheerfully allows himself to be patronised by the great Harrison Ainsworth. Charlotte Brontë's admiration for him is notorious. He resembled Fielding, she declared, "as an eagle

does a vulture." But this resemblance did not prevent her from being in great trouble about his soul. "He stirs in me both sorrow and anger," she wrote. "Why should he lead so harassing a life? Why should his mocking tongue so perversely deny the better feelings. of his better moods?" Of course she took him and others too seriously, but Thackeray alone frightened her. In his presence, she confesses, she was "fearfully stupid," and on the evening when first she met him, "excitement and exhaustion made savage work of her." But the admiration on either side was sincere, and while she dedicated Jane Eyre to the author of Vanity Fair, Thackeray repaid the compliment by writing a touching and sympathetic introduction to Emma.

Happy in his friends, Thackeray was happy also in his work. There was scarce a number of Vanity Fair which he did not produce "with inexpressible throes." But when the work was done he took a frank pleasure in it. He highly approved the simplicity of his style, and he never grew tired of his own characters. On one occasion he re-reads The Hoggarty Diamond, and "upon my word and honour," says he, "if it doesn't make you cry, I shall have a mean opinion of you." About the same time he is going to visit the Hôtel de la Terrasse at Brussels, "where Becky used to live. I shall pass by Captain Osborne's lodging, where I recollect meeting him and his little wife, who has married again, somebody told me; but it is always the way with these grandes passions-Mrs Dobbins, or some such name, she is now; always an overrated woman, I thought.

How curious it is! I believe perfectly in all those people, and feel quite an interest in the inn in which they lived."

But his novel, though it brought him fame and pleasure, did not bring him wealth, and he was still dependent upon journalism for a livelihood. Though he had given up The Examiner in 1845, he began, in the very midst of Vanity Fair, "to blaze away in The Chronicle again: it's an awful bribe that five guineas an article." The novelist of to-day would doubtless turn up his nose at the poor pittance which Thackeray received for his early novels-£50 a part, 'tis said, drawings and all. And the truth is, that when he had to pay a call of £112 on an abominable Irish railway he was embarrassed to find the money. Indeed, at the very time that Vanity Fair was bringing him glory he was called to the Bar, in the hope, no doubt, that he, the eagle, might follow Fielding, the vulture, to the magisterial bench. But, happily, this ambition and another (of a secretaryship at the Post Office) were foiled, and Thackeray remained loyal to his true and only vocation.

No sooner was Vanity Fair finished than he set to work upon Pendennis.1 It was written under different

1 The first number of Pendennis was published in November 1848. After the eleventh number (September 1849) there was a gap of three months, due to the author's illness, but the publication was resumed in January 1850, and in the following December the last (a double) number made its appearance. The book is appropriately dedicated to Dr John Elliotson, who tended the author through his illness, and "would take no other fee than thanks."