Thackeray

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY
FROM A DRAWING BY SAMUEL LAURENCE.

BY G. K. CHESTERTON AND LEWIS MELVILLE WITH NUMEROUS ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK JAMES POTT AND COMPANY LONDON HODDER AND STOUGHTON PRINTED BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY, ENGLAND.



From a drawing by Daniel Maclise about 1840
W. M. THACKERAY
(Reproduced from the Biographical Edition of Thackeray’s Works, by kind permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder & Co.)
AMID all the eulogies and all the slanders that are lavished upon the English character, very few people would appear to take any real trouble to obtain a sincere view of it. Rhetorical phrases about its inarticulate strength and nobility do not commonly bring us very much further, for it may be questioned whether it is good for a people excitedly to articulate their own inarticulate disposition. But, when all is said and done, it may truly be said that among all the national temperaments the English is pre-eminently simple and profoundly well-meaning. This well-meaningness combined with this simplicity is responsible for every one of its crimes, and it is the basis of its real and indestructible magnificence. But this union of moral soundness with mental innocence is responsible also for a certain tendency noticeable in all English life and character: the tendency to get hold of the truth, but to get hold of it falsely; to grasp the fact, but to grasp it somehow by the wrong end. A hundred instances might be given of this.