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 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