of our affection; she is also constructed by definition, ’If it were not too awful a thing to say of anybody, she meant well’—­the whole phrase gives exactly Christina’s stature.  Alethea Pontifex is really a bluff; but the bluff succeeds, largely because, having experience of Christina, we dare not call it.  Mrs Jupp is triumphantly complete; there are even moments when she seems as great as Mrs Quickly.  The novels that contain three such women (or two if we reckon the uncertain Alethea, who is really only a vehicle for Butler’s very best sayings, as cancelled by the non-existent Ellen) can be counted, we suppose, on our ten fingers.

Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).  But we know little of what went on inside him.  We can fill out Christina with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of Roughborough.  We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done.  When he reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur.  The glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening party we know him for a solid reality.  Pryer was half-created when his name was chosen.  Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which contains a perfect delineation of ‘the Oxford manner’ twenty years before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis.  The curious may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI.  But Ernest, upon whom so much depends, is a phantom—­a dream-child waiting the incarnation which Butler refused him for twenty years.  Was it laziness, was it a felt incapacity?  We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our duty to believe the worst.  The particularity of our attitude to Butler appears in the fact that we are disappointed, not with him, but with Ernest.  We are even angry with that young man.  If it had not been for him, we believe, The Way of all Flesh might have appeared in 1882; it might have short-circuited Robert Elsmere.

[JUNE, 1919.

* * * * *

We approach the biography of an author whom we respect, and therefore have thought about, with contradictory feelings.  We are excited at the thought of finding our conclusions reinforced, and apprehensive less the compact and definite figure which our imaginations have gradually shaped should become vague and incoherent and dull.  It is a pity to purchase enlightenment at the cost of definition; and it is more important that we should have a clear notion of the final shape of a man in whom we are interested than an exact record of his phases.