ace in any English market
town on any English market day. It brings out 'the irrelevancy of
Thackeray.' A good motto for the book is, for Chesterton, that
attributed to Cardinal Newman: 'Evil always fails by overleaping its aim
and good by falling short of it.' Our critic feels that the critics
have been unfair to Thackeray with respect to their denouncement of the
character of Amelia Sedley as being much too soft, whereas Chesterton
thinks she was really a fool, which is the logical outcome of being the
reverse of hard.

But Amelia was soft in a very delightful way. She was 'open to all
emotions as they came'--in fact, she was a fool who was wise because she
has retained her power of happiness, while the hard Rebecca has arrived
at hell, 'the hell of having all outward forces open, but all receptive
organs closed.'

It is necessary again to refer to the charge of cynicism that is
levelled against Thackeray. The mistake is, as our critic points out,
'taking a vague word and applying it precisely.' It all depends upon
what cynicism really means. 'If it means a war on comfort, then
Thackeray was, to his eternal credit, a cynic'; 'if it means a war on
virtue, then Thackeray, to his eternal honour, was the reverse of a
cynic.' His object is to show that silly goodness is better than clever
vice. As I have indicated, the long and the short of the matter is that
Thackeray created a lot of villains, and has therefore been called a
cynic by those who don't even know what the word means, or that there is
a literary blessedness in the making of villains to bring out the more
excellent virtues of the heroes.

* * * * *

From these two monumental works that were original in every way and
might almost be called propaganda, Thackeray passed on to a novel which
bore the name of 'Pendennis.' It was 'a novel with nothing else but a
hero, only that the hero is not very heroic,' which makes him all the
more interesting, for it makes him all the more human.

But Pendennis is more than a man--he is a type or symbol. He is 'the old
mystical tragedian of the Middle Ages, Everyman.' It is an epic, because
it celebrates the universal man with all his glorious failings and
glorious virtues. The love of Pendennis for Miss Fotheringay is a
different thing to the ordinary love of man for woman; it is rather the
love that is in every man for every woman. This is what I think
Chesterton means when he says '