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In all of these ways does Thackeray exert himself to give the world assurance of a woman. It would, however, be extremely difficult to imagine Becky Sharp divorced from her environment of London high society. She is a part of her setting, and her setting is a part of her.
We are all, perhaps, apt to think with Thackeray disrespectfully of the "old tragedies well-nigh dead, and full time too in which half a dozen characters appear and shout sonorous Alexandrines for half a dozen hours;" or we are disposed to agree with Mr.
Melville's The Thackeray Country. Kitton's The Dickens Country. Sloan's The Carlyle Country. Dougall's The Burns Country. Crockett's The Scott Country. Hill's Jane Austen: Her Homes and Her Friends. Cook's Homes and Haunts of John Ruskin. Eliot, The Brontë Country, Thackeray Land, The Thames from Oxford to the Nore. Hutton's Literary Landmarks of Edinburgh.
Not to believe in luck is a mark of perhaps greater folly than to over-believe in it: but luck will not always keep a man clear of such perils as that unskilful wedging of great blocks of mere history into his story, which the lesser historical novelists always commit, or that preponderance of mere narrative itself as compared with action and conversation from which even Dumas, even Thackeray, is not free.
Tennyson kept visiting London, where he saw Thackeray and the despair of Carlyle, and at Bath House he was too modest to be introduced to the great Duke whose requiem he was to sing so nobly. Oddly enough Douglas Jerrold enthusiastically assured Tennyson, at a dinner of a Society of Authors, that "you are the one who will live."
The freedom of intercourse between nation and nation was to slay the jealousy and suspicion which lead to war. To inaugurate the new era of peace and unfettered trade the Crystal Palace was reared in Hyde Park 'the palace made of windies, as Thackeray calls it and filled with the products of the world. The idea originated with the Prince Consort, and it was worthy of him.
Thackeray has a dread of servants, insomuch that he hates to address them, or to ask them for anything. His morbid sensibility, in this regard, has perhaps led him to study and muse upon them, so that he may be presumed to have a more intimate knowledge of this class than any other man.
Gordon, with his sad, sad humanism and bitter disappointment, held out his hand and took me with him. The regret of it all was I could never meet them Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, Longfellow, Gordon, Kendall, the men I loved, all were dead; but, blissful thought! Caine, Paterson, and Lawson were still living, breathing human beings two of them actually countrymen, fellow Australians!
Thackeray, Trollope, Green, Symonds, are possible exceptions examples of bookmen who passed their lives with books, and who never wrote to promote "a cause." But all the rest have entered on the "burning questions" of their age, and most of them with the main part of their force.
He met every one and knew every one, and was the companion of every kind of man and woman. He loved to frequent the "caves of harmony" which Thackeray has immortalized, and he was a member of all the best Bohemian clubs of London.
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