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.

The essential quality of great artists is incommensurable with
biography; they seem to be unconsciously engaged in a perpetual evasion
of the event. All that piety can do for them is beside the mark. Their
wilful spirit is fled before the last stone of the mausoleum can be got
in place, and as it flies it jogs the elbow of the cup-bearer and his
libation is spilt idly upon the ground. Although it would be too much
and too ungrateful to say that the monumental piety of Mr Festing Jones