“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 [Illustration: LONDON: H. CUNNINGHAM, 1, Sᵗ. MARTINS PLACE, TRAFALGAR SQUARE. 1841. De La Pluche M. A. Titmarsh Major Gahagan “COMIC TALES AND SKETCHES”] 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.” [Illustration: 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.” [Illustration: 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.