all these things may fail in their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences.  Nearly all the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured position of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in the personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected personal outbreaks.  The least successful instance the one that is made the text against all such first-personal interventions, is, of course, Thackeray.  But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makes first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch of dishonesty.  I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray.  It was a sham thoughtful, sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an aggressive, conscious, challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses the first person in Thackeray’s novels.  It isn’t the real Thackeray; it isn’t a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul and demands your sympathy.  That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it isn’t a condemnation of intervention.

I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations, starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing things without—­as, for instance, Mr. Joseph Conrad does for all practical purposes in his “Lord Jim”—­then it gives a sort of depth, a sort of subjective reality, that no such cold, almost affectedly ironical detachment as that which distinguishes the work of Mr. John Galsworthy, for example, can ever attain.  And in some cases the whole art and delight of a novel may lie in the author’s personal interventions; let such novels as “Elizabeth and her German Garden,” and the same writer’s “Elizabeth in Ruegen,” bear witness.

Now, all this time I have been hacking away at certain hampering and limiting beliefs about the novel, letting it loose, as it were, in form and purpose; I have still to say just what I think the novel is, and where, if anywhere, its boundary-line ought to be drawn.  It is by no means an easy task to define the novel.  It is not a thing premeditated.  It is a thing that has grown up into modern life, and taken upon itself uses and produced results that could not have been foreseen by its originators.  Few of the important things in the collective life of man started out to be what they are.  Consider, for example, all the unexpected aesthetic values, the inspiration and variety of emotional result which arises out of the cross-shaped plan of the Gothic cathedral, and the undesigned delight and wonder of white marble that has ensued, as I have been told, through the ageing and whitening of the realistically coloured statuary