But there are differences between a novel which contains innumerable good things and a great novel.  The most important is that a great novel does not contain innumerable good things.  You may not pick out the plums, because the pudding falls to pieces if you do.  In The Way of all Flesh, however, a compere is always present whose business it is to say good things.  His perpetual flow of asides is pleasant because the asides are piquant and, in their way, to the point.  Butler’s mind, being a good mind, had a predilection for the object, and his detestation of the rotunder platitudes of a Greek chorus, if nothing else, had taught him that a corner-man should have something to say on the subject in hand.  His arguments are designed to assist his narrative; moreover, they are sympathetic to the modern mind.  An enlightened hedonism is about all that is left to us, and Butler’s hatred of humbug is, though a little more placid, like our own.  We share his ethical likes and dislikes.  As an audience we are ready to laugh at his asides, and, on the first night at least, to laugh at them even when they interrupt the play.

But our liking for the theses cannot alter the fact that The Way of all Flesh is a roman a theses.  Not that there is anything wrong with the roman a theses, if the theses emerge from the narrative without its having to be obviously doctored.  Nor does it matter very much that a compere should be present all the while, provided that he does not take upon himself to replace the demonstration the narrative must afford, by arguments outside it.  But what happens in The Way of all Flesh?  We may leave aside the minor thesis of heredity, for it emerges, gently enough, from the story; besides, we are not quite sure what it is.  We have no doubt, on the other hand, about the major thesis; it is blazoned on the title page, with its sub-malicious quotation from St Paul to the Romans.  ’We know that all things work together for good to them that love God.’  The necessary gloss on this text is given in Chapter LXVIII, where Ernest, after his arrest, is thus described:—­

’He had nothing more to lose; money, friends, character, all were gone for a very long time, if not for ever; but there was something else also that had taken its flight along with these.  I mean the fear of that which man could do unto him. Cantabit vacuus.  Who could hurt him more than he had been hurt already?  Let him but be able to earn his bread, and he knew of nothing which he dared not venture if it would make the world a happier place for those who were young and lovable.  Herein he found so much comfort that he almost wished he had lost his reputation even more completely—­for he saw that it was like a man’s life which may be found of them that lose it and lost of them that would find it.  He should not have had the courage to give up all for Christ’s sake, but now Christ had mercifully taken all, and lo!