’As the days went slowly by he came to see that Christianity and the denial of Christianity after all met as much as any other extremes do; it was a fight about names—­not about things; practically the Church of Rome, the Church of England, and the freethinker have the same ideal standard and meet in the gentleman; for he is the most perfect saint who is the most perfect gentleman....’

With this help the text and the thesis can be translated:  ’All experience does a gentleman good.’  It is the kind of thing we should like very much to believe; as an article of faith it was held with passion and vehemence by Dostoevsky, though the connotation of the word ‘gentleman’ was for him very different from the connotation it had for Butler. (Butler’s gentleman, it should be said in passing, was very much the ideal of a period, and not at all quod semper, quod ubique; a very Victorian anti-Victorianism.) Dostoevsky worked his thesis out with a ruthless devotion to realistic probability.  He emptied the cornucopia of misery upon his heroes and drove them to suicide one after another; and then had the audacity to challenge the world to say that they were not better, more human, and more lovable for the disaster in which they were inevitably overwhelmed.  And, though it is hard to say ‘Yes’ to his challenge, it is harder still to say ‘No.’

In the case of Ernest Pontifex, however, we do not care to respond to the challenge at all.  The experiment is faked and proves nothing.  It is mere humbug to declare that a man has been thrown into the waters of life to sink or swim, when there is an anxious but cool-headed friend on the bank with a L70,000 life-belt to throw after him the moment his head goes under.  That is neither danger nor experience.  Even if Ernest Pontifex knew nothing of the future awaiting him (as we are assured he did not) it makes no difference. We know he cannot sink; he is a lay figure with a pneumatic body.  Whether he became a lay figure for Butler also we cannot say; we can merely register the fact that the book breaks down after Ernest’s misadventure with Miss Maitland, a deplorably unsubstantial episode to be the crisis of a piece of writing so firm in texture and solid in values as the preceding chapters.  Ernest as a man has an intense non-existence.

After all, as far as the positive side of The Way of all Flesh’ is concerned, Butler’s eggs are all in one basket.  If the adult Ernest does not materialise, the book hangs in empty air.  Whatever it may be instead it is not a great novel, nor even a good one.  So much established, we may begin to collect the good things.  Christina is the best of them.  She is, by any standard, a remarkable creation.  Butler was ‘all round’ Christina.  Both by analysis and synthesis she is wholly his.  He can produce her in either way.  She lives as flesh and blood and has not a little