1841.
De La Pluche M. A. Titmarsh Major Gahagan
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.”
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W. M. THACKERAY From a terra-cotta bust by Sir Edgar Boehm, R.A. after the plaster cast by Joseph Durham In the National Portrait Gallery |
“If truth is not always pleasant, at any rate truth is best.”
| WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY (Reproduced from the Biographical Edition of Thackeray’s Works, by kind permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.) |
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:
Stranger! I never writ a flattery,
Nor signed the page that registered a lie.
“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.