He picks up materials as he passes. He dines
with some officers, and perhaps he stations them at Chatteris. He
meets Miss G-, and her converse suggests a love passage between Pen
and Blanche. Why did he dislike fair women so? It runs all through
his novels. Becky is fair. Blanche is fair. Outside the old
yellow covers of "Pendennis," you see the blonde mermaid, "amusing,
and clever, and depraved," dragging the lover to the sea, and the
nut-brown maid holding him back. Angelina, of the "Rose and the
Ring," is the Becky of childhood; she is fair, and the good Rosalba
is brune. In writing "Pendennis" he had a singular experience. He
looked over his own "back numbers," and found "a passage which I had
utterly forgotten as if I had never read or written it." In
Lockhart's "Life of Scott," James Ballantyne says that "when the
'Bride of Lammermoor' was first put into his hands in a complete
shape, he did not recollect one single incident, character, or
conversation it contained." That is to say, he remembered nothing
of his own invention, though his memory of the traditional parts was
as clear as ever. Ballantyne remarks, "The history of the human
mind contains nothing more wonderful." The experience of Thackeray
is a parallel to that of Scott. "Pendennis," it must be noted, was
interrupted by a severe illness, and "The Bride of Lammermoor" was
dictated by Sir Walter when in great physical pain.
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