"Of course you can't," said Dabney. "It was at once one of the kindest and cruellest things that Heaven ever did to deny to human beings all capacity for really knowing anything about other human beings. You fellows can deceive us by your art into the illusion that you know; but that's all. Nobody knows. There's only one way, I take it, to write a psychological novel, and that is to proceed from yourself outwards. Done with courage and fidelity, that might give us one character that approximated to life; but you fellows crowd a hundred characters into each book. Someone once said, as a joke, that the way to write a novel was to make all the characters behave exactly as the author would, because we're all exactly alike, except that you yourself are a shade more imaginative and sensitive than anybody else. That was intended ironically, but I don't see any fault in it as a piece of practical advice. It has been successfully enough followed. But the result is not good enough--except as saleable stuff calculated to provide you with a motor-car, or a rock-garden, or whatever else you want. "It is because no one can really know others and can only guess at himself in imaginary situations," Dabney continued, "that I think all this recurring talk about absolute freedom for the novelist is such rot. Speyde here is always claiming for the novelist an unfettered hand. Everything, he says, must be told. We must have full-lengths; not mere heads or kit-cats any more. For too long had novelists suffered under the restrictions placed upon them by Mrs. Grundy and the circulating libraries. No story of a man's or woman's life is worth telling unless it tells all; and so on. But, in my capacity as a provocative host, let me say I don't give a row of pins for it." "Nor I," Lacey burst in. "If that's what the new novel is to be I shall return to my Dickens with the greater pleasure." Speyde was indignant. "We are talking about novels," he said: "documents. Not panoramas. Dickens doesn't count here. Thackeray might have counted if he'd had a chance. You remember his complaint that since Fielding no one had been allowed to draw a whole man." "Thackeray did very well without the dispensation," said Dabney. "As a matter of fact, I doubt if he could have gone further than he did; I doubt if anyone can go further than he does go: we all do our damnedest. I have always rather suspected that remark of Thackeray's: it was one of those hasty things which great men say and forget and some little twopenny-halfpenny listener remembers and sets down for ever. Given any imagination in the reader, he knows as much about Mr. Arthur Pendennis as there is any need for him to know, and surely you will admit that a novel is the work of the reader as well as the author."