the snobbery or laugh off the pathos. The strain of the satirist is strong in him, and satire is akin to allegory; there is even a strain of the caricaturist ready to emerge in the midst of his noblest art. He is especially fond of putting on the airs and graces of the showman. His preface to Vanity Fair is headed 'Before the Curtain'; and this great novel of real life concludes with 'Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out.' And we accept Thackeray's showman's humour. He chooses to treat a character as a puppet and call it Deuceace-that is his whim; we know the man, and believe in him none the less. We are not to be taken in with the made-up 'The famous little Becky puppet,' he wrote, 'has been pronounced to be uncommonly flexible in the joints and lively on the wire.' No: for my part, I cannot allow Thackeray himself to treat Mrs. Rawdon Crawley as a mere puppet; and that I think is why I resent her artificial maiden name. name. THE HISTORICAL NOVEL THE historical novel has never found favour with the unco critical, nor is their hostility without certain obvious justification. It is a matter of common observation how sadly writers err the moment they leave the sphere of their personal experience. The male novelist, who is wise, shuns the details of his heroine's dress, and, like Mr. Black, contents himself with such safe generalities as 'all in cream white with a bunch of scarlet geraniums in her bosom.' The light brigade of lady novelists, less easily daunted, makes its heroic charge into university slang and the secrets of the smoking-room; and we exclaim, 'C'est magnifique,' but we do not look for success. If the pitfalls lie so close at our door, to plunge into the dim distances of history must surely be to court disaster. And when, instead of considering probabilities, we turn to examples of novels historical and unhistorical by the same authors, it may seem to some that a comparison of, say, Romola with Adam Bede, or of Esmond with The Newcomes, goes to support the view of the critics. In spite of the subtle truth of the picture of moral dissolution presented in Tito, most people in reading Romola experience a chilling sense of general unreality, and withal a fatiguing consciousness of the author's effort to be accurately Florentine, which prevents it from taking in their hearts an equal place with the earlier stories of middle-class English life. Esmond is a favourable example for the author: the age of Queen Anne is not very far removed from to-day, and the pages of The Spectator make its character and manners familiar ; Thackeray had an intimate literary knowledge of it-indeed Professor Seeley has had to combat the heresy that the novelist would have been its best historian. Yet Esmond even, compared with Vanity Fair or The Newcomes, has suffered somewhat in popularity from its constraint of pose. Nay, take Scott himself. Few will dissent from the opinion that Scott's strongest characters are to be found among the types he knew, the peasants and lairds and bailies of Scotland and the Border, the immortal race of Dandie Dinmonts and Nicol Jarvies. That was Lockhart's opinion. For the matter of that, it was Scott's own opinion. You may set Isaac of York and Rebecca beside Davie and Jeanie Deans, without any loss of picturesque charm, but hardly without some weakening of the sense of their reality. No sooner had the prestige of Scott's triumph waned, and his wand fallen into the hands of weaker wizards, impotent to work his spells, than critical objections to historical romance began to find vigorous expression. The hostility of the professed historians. was no doubt to be expected. But there is Mr. Leslie Stephen, a professed literary critic, who has spoken in his time much good sense about fiction, frankly giving up the historical novel. Hypatia and Westward Ho! he speaks of as brilliant but almost solitary exceptions to the general dreariness of their class. He is sure they are full of hopeless inaccuracies: he does not believe that men like the Goths ever existed in this world; and he is prepared to give up the whole tribe of monks, pagans, Jews, and Fathers of the Church. Even in his 'dear Ivanhoe' he thinks that the buff-jerkin business, which aroused Carlyle's easily aroused contempt, is an element of decay, and that consequently the book is on the high road to ruin, like one of Reynolds's most carelessly painted pictures. He quotes with approval Sir Francis Palgrave's opinion, that historical novels are the mortal enemies of history; and adds for himself that they are mortal enemies of fiction. 'There may be an exception or two, but as a rule the task is simply impracticable. The novelist is bound to come so near to the facts that we feel the unreality of his portraits.' This is plain speaking; yet in spite of all this Mr. Stephen confesses that he rejoices in the Amal and Raphael ben Ezra, and that he loves Ivanhoe and Front-de-Boeuf and Wamba the Witless. If the lover chastise thus with whips, it were no wonder if the late Professor |