arrant the act of courage in beginning the work.

In this chapter it will be convenient to pay special attention to the
introduction that is so ably contributed by Chesterton. It will only be
possible to refer to the passages he has selected from Thackeray, and
the reader must judge of the merit of the choosing. It is one of the
hardest things possible to choose representative passages from a great
writer. Shall he choose those that display the literary qualities of the
writer, shall he choose those which depict his powers of drama, shall he
select those which bring out the humour of the writer, shall he pick at
random and let the passage stand or fall on its own merits? These are
questions that must be faced in a work of the nature of Chesterton's
Thackeray. What the method has been will, I hope, be clear at the end of
this chapter.

It was Thackeray's expressed wish that there should be no biography
written of him, a position that might indicate extreme modesty, colossal
conceit, or distinct cowardice. Whatever the reason, it has not been
entirely obeyed, and rightly. A man of the power of Thackeray cannot
live without the world being in some way better; it is only good that
those who never knew him in the flesh should at least know him in a
book. It is not enough that, as Chesterton points out, he 'was of all
novelists the most autobiographical,' which is not to say that he wrote
unending personal confessions with a very large I, but rather that his
books were drawn from the experiences of his life, a field that is
productive of the richest literary worth.

Thackeray was born, we are told, in the year 1811, so that he was a year
old when the world received two babies who were like ten thousand other
babies, except that they happened to be Browning and Dickens. It was the
time when the world trembled, because that mighty soldier Napoleon stood
with arms folded, waiting to strike, it knew not where. It was the time
when military genius reached its height, a height that could be only
brought low by one thing, and that was an English General with a long
nose and a cocked hat.

Although Thackeray was born in Calcutta, he was as English as he could
possibly be. But he did not forget his Eastern beginning. 'A certain
vague cosmological quality was always mixed with his experience, and it
was his favourite boast that he had seen men and cities like Ulysses.'
Which is to say that he had not only seen the world, he had felt