Pendennis-The Literary Profession.

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ART. II.-The History of Pendennis; his Fortunes and Misfortunes; his Friends and his Greatest Enemy. By WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY. With Illustrations on Steel and Wood by the Author. London, 1849-1850.

THERE were many thousands of readers who, when it was announced in the public prints, that owing to the serious indisposition of the author, the periodical issue of Pendennis was temporarily suspended, took the matter to heart as though some dear friend and cherished companion had been suddenly smitten like a child at play, and carried from the bright, cheerful, outer atmosphere to the darkness and stillness of the sick-chamber. He was lost to us for a while, and we missed him. Many, it is true, had freely exercised the "glorious privilege" of grumbling, and had complained, with critical regularity, once a month, that Pendennis was "a falling-off-not equal to Vanity Fair;" but they did not like to go without it for all that, and pushed eager questions into every likely quarter about the chances of its reappearance. And when it reappeared, after a painful interval of some months, grumblers and admirers alike rejoiced. Some might have cared little about "Master Pen;" but all cared about Mr. Thackeray. If that young gentleman's career had been brought suddenly to a close by a railway accident or an attack of cholera, or if he had been "snuffed out by an article" on the popular novel of "Walter Lorraine," or sent, like young Mr. Caxton, to the antipodes, there are many who would not have deplored the accident with any acute anguish of mind. But the restoration of Mr. Thackeray to the outer world of social converse was another matter altogether. People who had never seen him in the flesh rejoiced at his return, and welcomed him back again with feelings of personal cordiality. For the alliance between Mr. Thackeray and his readers is, in this respect, something peculiar. There is no writer of the present day who has established such friendly relations between himself and the public-none whom the reader seems to know so well, and with whom he feels so familiar. Mr. Thackeray is the very reverse of a myth. His identity does not recede from us, but comes out boldly to meet us. We think, somehow, that we have often met him-that we are in the habit of dining with him that he has often come to take a bed in our house, or been housed with us beneath other men's roofs. We think that we have often spent a day in pleasant converse with him-no high discourse about fixed fate, free-will, foreknowledge absolute," but common everyday talk about worldly topics-snobs and

snobbery flunkeys and flunkeyism-the shams and pretences of great and little people; and other matters whereof good Mr. Brown is held to be a high authority; and that he has drunk our indifferent wine with a relish, because we have not tried to make it any better by imparting to it a flavour of lies.

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In the kindly interest thus taken in his individual manhood, there must, to every right-minded, sound-hearted writer, be pleasures and privileges past counting. But there are pains and penalties too. The results of this personal identification do not always take the pleasant, genial shape which we have outlined somewhat vaguely above. Mr. Thackeray is a satirist. Not at all truculent-not at all ill-natured; on the other hand, very quiet and good-humoured in his satire, he does not snarl, like a dog, at the weaknesses of his fellows; but drops his ridicule like a gentleman, and laughs gently at the foibles of mankind. Still he is a satirist; and, as a satirist, the more truthful, the more likely to offend. He cannot expect entire exemption from the penalties which beset his tribe; nor, as a sensible and reasonable man, does he, we are sure, expect it. Perhaps he is not even surprised to find from what quarter he has been most assailed. But he is doubtless sorry, as we are, to think, that whilst he has ridiculed the absurdities, and censured the vices of all orders of society, only his own order has risen up against him. He has been accused of endeavouring to write down his own class to lower, in the estimation of the world, the character of those who "live by their pen." And such a motive has been attributed to him, that if the charge were only true, on the titlepage of every future edition of The Book of Snobs, ought to be printed the expressive words, By One of Themselves. Why, what a gigantic snob must the man be, who, to ingratiate himself with the worldly great-with all, indeed, who owe their position in society to rank, to wealth, or to eminence in any acknow

* In Dr. Cumming's Apocalyptic Sketches-not a very likely book, one would think, to supply us with theatrical anecdotes-there is a story of Jenny Lind, which may be cited in connexion with this matter:-" A singer, whose performances have recently made a very great impression on the public mind, and whose personal purity and worth are equal to her artistic talents, made the remark to a friend of mine, who told me of it, It is not me they admire, but my voice; and that cannot make me happy, though it gives them delight." We do not believe the case really to be as it is stated by Jenny Lind; for no artist has ever attracted so much personal interest towards herself, irrespectively of the art of which she is so wonderful an exponent; but the anecdote is worth quoting as an illustration of the unsatisfying nature of that artistic success, which simply raises admiration of the thing done, and excites no interest in the doer. It is very true, with respect to authors, that the world often reads and admires their books, but cares little more about themselves than if they were mere composing-machines, without any every day life of their own apart from the work of composition. But there are some exceptions to this rule-and it is a great privilege to be the object of one.

Mr. Thackeray no Flunkey.

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ledged profession, with large prizes and privileges in its reachseeks to degrade the profession of literature, and to undervalue not merely the social, but the intellectual character of the men who have devoted their lives to it. Yet this is the substance of the charge that has been brought against Mr. Thackeray. The readers of Pendennis know that the young gentleman after whom the story is named sets up in life as a professional writer, or, as his friend Mr. Warrington expresses it," a literary hack;" and that they are introduced in the course of the story to a good deal of literary society, including publishers, editors, contributors, reviewers, &c. &c., none of it being of a very attractive or a very respectable kind. These sketches of literary society would appear to have given offence to some literary men; and as the genus irritabile live, as it were, in harness-that is, always have a pen within their reach, and a printing-office at no great distance the offences of the author of Pendennis have been visited on the spot, and he has been held up to the contempt of his fellows as a mean and pitiful toady, seeking to ingratiate himself with others by maligning his own order.

It were worth while to avail ourselves of such an opportunity to examine the question as it stands between Mr. Thackeray and the literary profession, and to ascertain the precise amount of truth there is to be found in his sketches of literary life; but before we enter upon the inquiry, it were well that we should express our unqualified conviction that the author of Pendennis is the last man in England to write a line for the purpose of ingratiating himself with people of good condition, who dine at Gaunt House, and look out of Club windows in St. James's. Why, who are the people who have ever been the objects of his ridicule-whom has he gibbeted most effectually in his quiet way? Whom, but the quasi-respectables of the world, the pretenders of high degree? Has he bowed down before the golden calf, or pressed to his heart the guinea-stamp of rank and fashion? If there be a writer living who ought to be exempt from the reproach of toadyism, it is the author of Vanity Fair and the Snobs of England. Mr. Thackeray has striven manfully to write down the Shams of the world. He has done it more effectually, because more intelligibly, than Mr. Carlyle. He has done it in a more catholic spirit as a man without any violent prejudices, any overflowings of bitterness against the great, simply because they are great. There are writers, perhaps too many of them at the present time, who stand and blaspheme at the portals of the great because they cannot gain admittance there; whose creed it is that there is an impassable gulf between virtue and high estate; that to be wellborn is to be ignorant and vicious, and to be rich is to be hard of heart. Mr. Thackeray has no one

sidedness of this kind; but who can read what he has written and say that he has any especial tenderness for the vices and follies of the great? Are his great lords more attractive or more reputable than his poor devil authors? Are his Steynes and Colchicums less repulsive than his Bludyers and Shandons? Yet it is insinuated, that to conciliate the Steynes and the Colchicums he has sketched these Bludyers and Shandons. Or, if he has not aimed as high as marquises, at whose good graces has he aimed? If he has not endeavoured to carry the affections of the peerage by storm, perhaps he has struck at the baronetage, as represented by Sir Pitt Crawley and Sir Francis Clavering. Or, peradventure, he has laid siege to the wealthy merchants and bankers of the city, by honouring their class in the person of Mr. Osborne; or the young sparks of the army, by exalting the military profession through the agency of such heroes as Rawdon Crawley, Captain Costigan, and Colonel O'Dowd; or the Indian connexion, by his highly flattering pictures of Mr. Josh and the Begum; or club-men, by the exhibition of the made-up Major; or University-men, by the portraiture of the accomplished Mr. Harry Foker: or is it in those quiet little bits of satire, which seem to drop unintentionally from his pen, and sparkle upon us unawares, as when he tells us of a man who was " abject and a shuffler in the very height of his prosperity; and had he been a Crown-prince, he could not have been more weak, useless, dissolute, or ungrateful;" or, when speaking of the inimitable Becky at the Brussels ball, he says, that " it was only from her French being so good, you could know she was not a born woman of fashion;" is it in these little incidental touches that the flunkeyism of Michael Angelo Titmarsh so unmistakably betrays itself? In truth, it seems a hard thing that a man who has been doing battle so long and so stoutly against flunkeyism, should be written down a flunkey at last. But such hard things are in the experience of most men who have mixed much with the world. Some time or other in a man's life he is pretty sure to be accused of the very offence of all others it is most impossible for him to commit. Such discipline, perhaps, is wholesome. It takes the pride out of us better than anything in the world.

We do not deny that Mr. Thackeray's pictures of literary life are extremely disagreeable. Nor do we deny that they are, in some parts, greatly overdrawn. The first introduction of Mr. Pen to the "Corporation of the Goose-quill," at a supper-house of very equivocal reputation, must have given that tenderly-nurtured young gentleman no very elevated ideas of the fraternity which he subsequently joined. But if he had met the literary gentlemen who belaboured each other with carpet-bags in good Mr. Pickwick's time, would he have been elevated into no higher heaven

Pictures of Literary Life.

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of admiration and delight? The editor of the "Eatonswill Gazette" is not a more attractive literary hero than the Editor of the " Pall Mall Gazette," or the Sub-editor of the "Dawn;" but we have never heard it alleged against Mr. Dickens, that he has endeavoured to write down the literary profession. It is the necessity of this kind of comic writing that it should partake largely of caricature. But it is more true in fact, at the same time that it is pleasanter to believe, that the editors of rival journals, after belabouring each other in print, should sup amicably together, and exchange friendly inquiries after their wives and little ones, than that they should come to fisticuffs in the kitchen. Moreover, it is to be remembered, although Mr. Thackeray's anachronisms will hardly suffer us to remember it, that Arthur Pendennis' introduction into literary life happened many years ago; and that the Sketches now before us are supposed to be transcripts rather of the past than the present. There is observable in "Pendennis," as in "Vanity Fair," a curious fusion of epochs, not unlike that fusion of names, the result of which is the famous University of Oxbridge; for Mr. Thackeray is at no pains to observe chronology and costume in his fictions. Thus, in the party to which Master Pen is introduced in the "Back Kitchen," we meet the Irish Editors of a by-gone time, and the high-life "London Correspondent" of the present. It is not improbable that many older writers than ourselves will recognise the Noolans and Doolans as no such outrageous caricatures; and no one who reads the "London Correspondence" of some of the leading provincial journals, will see much more in the picture of Mr. Archer-the gentleman who is so much at home at Apsley House and in the Palace, and who knows so much more about the great than they know themselves, than a London letter in coat and trousers. And even the harshness of this picture is softened down by the admission, that "put aside his archery, that man is both able and honest-a good man of business-an excellent friend-admirable to his family as husband, father, and son"-qualities seldom found in the same person; for though many literary men are, doubtless, admirable as husbands, fathers, and sons, we know very few who are all this and "good men of business" too.

From the back kitchen we are taken to the back parlour of the publisher, which, however, we shall not enter at presentand then we are introduced to the interior of the Fleet Prison, where a literary gentleman, for the consideration of a five pound note, is writing, in presence of a publisher, a prospectus for a new journal. This literary gentleman is one Captain Shandon, of whom we have a picture in the following words: