novelist's art. Clarissa is a thing quite out of Fielding's reach. He never approached its noble unity of conception. Compared with Clarissa all his people seem superficial and external. He has never been inside the very soul of any of his creations, as Richardson has been inside the soul of Clarissa. It is a new world of imaginative power altogether that we come to when we pass from him to live, as Richardson can make us live, in the most secret chambers of Clarissa's being, identify ourselves with her, and hang breathless for whole volumes on the slow-moving crisis of her fate.

Now Richardson, whose work, it may be remarked, had immense popularity and influence abroad, lays his chief stress on character. Johnson, though a great admirer of Richardson, is well known to have said that, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself'. No real Richardsonian would admit that. The story is, in fact, of absorbing interest; but the point is that it is interesting in the new way, not in the old. The stuff of the book is to be sought in the heart, mind, and soul of Clarissa; the things which happen are only its illustrations. It is the most individual book that was ever written, and in that sense the most modern. For the real difference between ancient literature and modern-one which, in spite of much loose talk to-day about the corporate spirit in Church and State, is continually growing wider-is the substitution of the individual for the State or the class or the family, as the centre of imaginative and dramatic interest. And Clarissa is the supreme instance of this. In her story we know nothing of State or Church, and in her family we have nothing but a collection of impertinent obstacles to the free development of an individual soul. This overpowering interest in character was safe enough in the case of a born storyteller like Richardson. With him the stress laid on the

inner life of an individual could not extinguish the plot altogether. Genius can in this Genius can in this way often manage to escape the dangers of its own age. But the fact that the novel had come to its own in a century given over as none before or since to the criticism of life and manners had its inevitable effect on others. And if we look at two famous stories by two very great men of letters, who, widely as they differed, were both very typical men of the eighteenth century and were the acknowledged chiefs of literature, each in his own country-if we look at Rasselas and Candide, we shall find that, where a man is not a born story-teller, he inevitably yields to the spirit of his age, and his story is buried in criticism of life and discussion of moral ideas. Plot, in fact, is nothing; the interest of character has destroyed it; and, as the life of the novel depends on the union of the two, the story, as a story, is dead. We read Candide to laugh with it, and Rasselas perhaps to learn from it, but no one will ever again read either for the story.

The problem of the novel was therefore left over for the nineteenth century to solve. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as in the Middle Age, it had tended to be a mere succession of disconnected adventures, superficial, external, accidental, neither influencing character nor influenced by it. In the eighteenth century it tends to become a moral essay. The interest now lies in character; but the plot, where there is one, is uninfluenced, and remains absurd and incredible, as in Candide and even in the beautiful masterpiece of Goldsmith. The thing the future had to try to do was to realize their union by interaction of the external and internal, circumstance making itself felt as the destiny which shapes character, and character asserting itself as the transforming architect of circumstance. But first of all the novel had to have its share in the general escape from the colourless abstraction of the eighteenth century. It had to recover the element of action, of poetry,

of visible life. All that was, of course, achieved by Scott with a splendour which carried him all over Europe. But Scott did not take his work seriously enough to grapple successfully with the artistic problem of the novelist. He can create the Antiquary, but he cannot create a rational or probable world of action for him to move in. Only, perhaps, in his most perfect story can he make the whole plot turn with complete dramatic probability round a central character; and, when he has created Jeanie Deans and a world for her to dominate, he shows by the slipshod and vulgar fairy-tale of his last chapters how little he values or understands his achievement.

6

Scott's greatness lay not in any working of art but in the careless abundance of the world that came to life at his will, and in the genial sympathy with which he looked at every creature in it. Here is God's plenty,' we say as we read him; a plenty still full of waste and disorder and apparent inconsequence, as it is in the greater world outside. But while he, out of this abundance of his, was pouring the riches of his genius into the treasury of the novel, there was a young woman who was putting into it two mites which, from the strict and narrow point of view of art, out-valued all his wealth. Jane Austen never gets out of the parlour '; nothing of importance happens in her novels; nothing great is ever said in them; but all that happens and all that is said belongs strictly to the persons who are the actors in the story. Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion may or may not be great novels, but perfect novels they unquestionably are. Here then, on a small scale, was the goal attained, plot and character interacting in unity. Henceforth there is no step to be taken in artistic method; the development for the future is one not of method but of scale, not of art but of substance. The novel cannot be satisfied till it has tried to take all life, not Jane Austen's tiny fraction of life, for its province; and for that it will have to gain a wider experience, a deeper emotion, a profounder philosophy,

a more scientific grasp of the forces which issue in the tragedy and comedy of human lives.

The effort to provide these is the history of the novel in the nineteenth century. That is, happily, not my present subject, for it would be a vast one. No previous century gave to the novel a twentieth or a fiftieth part of the literary energy given by the nineteenth. Everything in turn was poured into it by Dickens an invincible belief in the value of life, an inexhaustible fountain of laughter and tears; by the Brontë sisters an almost Shakespearean power of tragedy; by George Eliot a seriousness both of mind and conscience, strange to what had previously been the least serious of literary forms; by Victor Hugo an exuberance of power that could include, as in an epic, the whole life of his age; by George Meredith a quality and quantity of brain which had never before been given to the novel; by Flaubert that infinite patience both of art and science which is not genius, but the instrument by which genius may create perfection, if it retains the freedom to use the results with mastery and ease. All these and other things, which in earlier centuries would have taken other shapes, took in the nineteenth century the shape of the novel. By the end of the century, aided by the decay of the drama, the once despised novel could claim to be the principal interpreter of the mind of the age, second only in dignity to poetry and far superior to it in general popularity.

Among those who in England did most to give it that position was William Makepeace Thackeray, the centenary of whose birth was widely celebrated last year.1 One of the best forms the celebration took was the issue by his old publishers of a Centenary Edition of his works, with Introductions by his daughter, Lady Ritchie. These Introductions are not, indeed, new. The bulk of them had already appeared in the Biographical Edition twelve years ago.

1 i. e. in 1911.

But they have now been considerably enlarged and a few mistakes corrected. For instance, the present Introduction to Vanity Fair contains thirty-five pages, some half-dozen of which at least are absent from the old one, and they are not the least interesting, including, as they do, some extracts, which will be new to most people, from Whitwell Elwin's Quarterly essays on Thackeray, the statement that Dobbin was founded on Thackeray's (and FitzGerald's) great friend, Archdeacon Allen, and the curious conversation between Mr. J. E. Cooke and Thackeray as to whether Becky killed Jos Sedley. And there are a good many additional illustrations, both in the Introduction and in the book itself.

Thackeray did not wish his life to be written, and these charming pictures of him, as his daughter and his friends remember him, are likely to remain the nearest approach we shall ever get to an authoritative biography. Lady Ritchie's writing is, like her father's and even more so, of a very easy and desultory sort, rambling backwards and forwards over an uncertain country, very reluctant to be tied by any chronological or other order. As in the novels, so in these Introductions, we are often a little uncertain where we are, and what year or what people we are talking about. The daughter does not care any more than the father to make it quite clear who people are, and what relation they bear to each other; and, like him, she frequently prefers to give us the marriage or the funeral first, and to say nothing about the courtship or illness till afterwards; all of which is rather confusing. To give one instance only. Vanity Fair fills the first two volumes of the edition; it may therefore be assumed that its Introduction will generally be the first read. Yet the reader, who may very possibly know nothing of Thackeray's life, is casually introduced to members of the Carmichael-Smyth family without a word of explanation of Thackeray's connexion with them. All we are told is that 'the schoolboy