therefore the whole story, would have been twice as impressive had the book, from p. 125 onwards, contained just half its present number of words. But whether this opinion be right or wrong, the book remains a big book, and its story a beautiful story. MR. ANTHONY HOPE Oct. 27, 1894. "The God in the Car" and "The Indiscretion of the Duchess." As I set down the titles of these two new stories by Mr. Anthony Hope, it occurs to me that combined they would make an excellent title for a third story yet to be written. For Mr. Hope's duchess, if by any chance she found herself travelling with a god in a car, would infallibly seize the occasion for a _tour de force_ in charming indiscretion. That the car would travel for some part of the distance in that position of unstable equilibrium known to skaters as the "outside edge" may, I think, be taken for granted. But far be it from me to imagine bungling developments of the situation I here suggest to Mr. Hope's singular and agreeable talents. Like Mr. Stevenson's smatterer, who was asked, "What would be the result of putting a pound of potassium in a pot of porter?" I content myself with anticipating "that there would probably be a number of interesting bye-products." Be it understood that I suggest only a combination of the titles--not of the two stories as Mr. Hope has written them: for these move on levels altogether different. The constant reader of _The Speaker's_ "Causeries" will be familiar with the two propositions--not in the least contradictory--that a novel should be true to life, and that it is quite impossible for a novel to be true to life. He will also know how they are reconciled. A story, of whatever kind, must follow life at a certain remove. It is a good and consistent story if it keep at that remove from first till last. Let us have the old tag once more: "Servetur ad inum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet." A good story and real life are such that, being produced in either direction and to any extent, they never meet. The distance between the parallels does not count: or rather, it is just a matter for the author to choose. It is here that Mr. Howells makes his mistake, who speaks contemptuously of Romance as _Puss in Boots_. _Puss in Boots_ is a masterpiece in its way, and in its way just as true to life--_i.e._, to its distance from life--as that very different masterpiece _Silas Lapham_. When Mr. Howells objects to the figure of Vautrin in _Le Père Goriot_, he criticizes well: Vautrin in that tale is out of drawing and therefore monstrous. But to bring a similar objection against Porthos in _Le Vicomte de Bragelonne_ would be very bad criticism; for it would ignore all the postulates of the story. In real life Vautrin and Porthos would be equally monstrous: in the stories Vautrin is monstrous and Porthos is not.