“Admirable on all counts,” says Aristotle, “Homer has the special merit of being the only poet who understands the part he should take himself. In his own person he should intrude as little as possible. It is not in that way he imitates life. Other writers force themselves into the business throughout and imitate but little and rarely. Homer, after a few words of preface, at once brings in a man or a woman as it may be, never characterless but each distinctively characteristic.”

To put it in another way—and to employ for once a couple of terms which as a rule these discourses banish, a story should be as purely objective as possible, the author’s meaning infused indeed (as it must be in any story worth the telling) but his own person, with his own commentary, as rigidly excluded as from a stage-play—say, as from King Lear or Tartuffe. Madame Bovary and Boule de Suif were the exemplars (to name but two); any chat by the author himself ranked as an offence against art.

III

Now, just accepting this as a historical fact, without question for the moment of its Tightness or wrongness, you will easily see how impatient it made that generation with many things to which their fathers had been prone. Let me mention two or three.

(1) To begin with, it made them abhor those detailed descriptions of hero, heroine and others—those page-long introductions to which the great Sir Walter was prone: the philosophical reason for this being that no art should attempt that which can be far better done by another. “Her hair, of a raven gloss, concealed its luxuriance within the confines of a simple ribbon. Loosened, it fell below her waist. The upper part of her face, with its purely-arched eyebrows, suggested a Cleopatra. A lover of the antique might have cavilled, perchance, at the slight uptilt of the nose, which indeed, etc.: or again at the pout of the pretty, provocative mouth reminiscent”—well, of some picture of Greuze rather than of some statue or other with which the reader was presumably acquainted. “But as she burst upon Harold’s vision in a gown of some simple soft white clinging material—” and so on. It seemed that a drawing could do that sort of thing better and, for the reader, in one-twentieth part of the time.

(2) Secondly, our theory cut out long descriptions of “natural scenery.” Hardy’s preliminary Chapter of Egdon Heath would, of course, be judged for what it was—a deliberate and magnificent setting of slow, perdurable nature as background to the transitory life of man, the stern breast that has suckled so many fretful children and seen them pass. And again, as in The Woodlanders all the sap of English woodland—all its spirits of Dryad and Hamadryad—all its aeolian murmurs in the upper boughs—might be evoked to dignify a most simple country story. But the sort of romanticism that used to enjoy itself in the Alps, amid thunderstorms, the solitary communings of the tortured breast with the grander aspects of peak and ravine, of the atrabilious or merely bilious, with the avalanche—all this [shall I call it the Obermann nonsense?] was wiped out even as the terrors of that gentleman who making an early ascent of the tall but inconsiderable slope of Glaramara, sat down and demanded to be “let blood.” In short, lengthy descriptions of scenery passed out of vogue along with lengthy descriptions of feminine charms.

(3) Thirdly—and to be very brief about this—the names of invented characters came to be real, or at least plausible names. Such names as those with which Dickens, Thackeray, Trollope, spoilt the verisimilitude of their novels—“Lord Frederick Verisopht,” “Mr. Quiverful” or the list of Becky’s guests in Vanity Fair—“the Duchess Dowager of Stilton, Duc de la Gruyère, Marchioness of Cheshire, Marchese Allessandro Strachino, Comte de Brie, Baron Schapsugar and Chevalier Tosti”—all in the slang of that day “quite the cheese.” You may say what you like against the old realistic novel, but anyhow it earned a living in its day if only by cutting out this detestable boil inherited from Ben Jonson, with his type names of Brain-worm, Well-bred, La Foule, Sir Epicure Mammon, and so on....

(4) But above all this passion of one’s youth for purely objective treatment of narrative fell as a denunciatory curse upon Thackeray’s incurable habit of preaching. And here, if we were right (which I shall not here contend), we blithely damned ourselves to the permanent unpopularity we are beginning to enjoy. Take warning: for if there be one vice this nation has in its bones it is a fondness for preaching. An inscrutable addiction, an unholy habit! I observe even in railway trains that nine of our nation will swallow a column of propaganda, unashamed in its cookery, for one that will relish a clean news-report. And yet, Gentlemen, the mind that can separate clean news from propaganda and suggestion is the only mind we should seek to send forth from this city of ours, as the only mind that shall save our state.

This awful propensity to preaching!—and but yesterday an attempt to force upon all Professors no less than forty preachments a year—a gluttony of misemployment in a land of unemployed!

Let me illustrate. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote a story, Treasure Island, over which a number of those young men of whom I have been talking waxed enthusiastic, just because it told a plain tale neatly as (they held) a tale should be told. But Treasure Island cut (as they say) very little ice with the General Public. What fetched the General Public and made Stevenson popular was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and that because the General Public read into it a religious lesson which the author had never intended. Thereafter he, having ever in him a strain, as W. E. Henley noted, a