I do not mean by this that Thackeray was consciously a Socialist; quite the contrary. As a member of the ruling classes, he pleads with them to be worthy of their high and agreeable destiny. How completely he believed in the “gentleman” you can see by the treatment he gives to his hero, Pendennis, a perfectly worthless young idler, and to Major Pendennis, a cynical and depraved old rascal. Thackeray condones the former and loves and pities the latter, and expects us to weep over the closing picture of the old martinet, having lost his fortune, obliged to dwell in a charity home with other indigent parasites. I speak for one reader, who could have borne with entire equanimity to see the major at work on the rock-pile, accompanied by all the other idle clubmen of London. Thackeray in his writings rebelled against some conventions of his world, but in his every-day life he was as helpless as Amelia Sedley. His wife became insane, so he fell victim of that superstition which condemns the innocent partner in such a marriage to life-long celibacy. Thackeray, enduring this infliction, seemed heroic to his friends, and pitiful to us. He left it to a woman novelist, George Eliot, to set the precedent of defiance to this especially idiotic tribal taboo. George Eliot loved George Henry Lewes, who had an insane wife, and she went and lived with Lewes for twenty-four years, until his death, and told all the world about it. Thus we have one pleasant detail to record concerning Victorian England. In his early days Thackeray had lived poorly, because he had to; but later he acquired a taste for expensive food, and especially drink, and thereby ruined his health and died at the age of fifty-two. This, of course, was devoutly concealed by his daughters, and explains the fact that no biography was published. Like other conventional gentlemen, he felt bound to provide incomes for these daughters, so he wasted his time trying to get some government sinecure, first in the post office, and then in the diplomatic service--the very kind of thing he exposed in his stories. He took to lecturing, following in the foot-steps of Dickens, but not enjoying the work, because he had nothing of the showman in him, but on the contrary the English gentleman’s intense reserve. All this is what is called “gossip,” and is supposed to have nothing to do with the works of a great writer. I record my belief, that the character and life experiences of an artist make his works of art, in the same way that a mold makes the image out of the liquid metal. The quickest route to the understanding of any novelist or poet is to know these personal details about him; and above all, his relationship to those who paid him the money which kept him alive from day to day. Whether he conforms, or whether he rebels, these money-forces condition a man’s life. CHAPTER LXXIV ARTS AND CRAFTS