They’re all little Jesuses in their own eyes, and their “purpose” is to prove it. Oh Lord!--_Lord Jim!_ _Sylvestre Bonnard!_ _If Winter Comes!_ _Main Street!_ _Ulysses!_ _Pan!_ They are all pathetic or sympathetic or antipathetic little Jesuses _accomplis_ or _manqués_. And there is a heroine who is always “pure”, usually, nowadays, on the muck-heap! Like the Green Hatted Woman. She is all the time at the feet of Jesus, though her behaviour there may be misleading. Heaven knows what the Saviour really makes of it: whether she’s a Green Hat or a Constant Nymph (eighteen months of constancy, and her heart failed), or any of the rest of ’em. They are all, heroes and heroines, novelists and she-novelists, little Jesuses or Jesusesses. They may be wallowing in the mire: but then didn’t Jesus harrow Hell! _A la bonne heure!_ Oh, they are all novelists with an idea of themselves! Which is a “purpose”, with a vengeance! For what a weary, false, sickening idea it is nowadays! The novel gives them away. They can’t fool the novel. Now really, it’s time we left _off_ insulting the novel any further. If your purpose is to prove your own Jesus qualifications, and the thin stream of your inspiration is “sin”, then dry up, for the interest is dead. _Life as it is!_ What’s the good of pretending that the lives of a set of tuppenny Green Hats and Constant Nymphs is Life-as-it-is, when the novel itself proves that all it amounts to is life as it is isn’t life, but a sort of everlasting and intricate and boring habit: of Jesus peccant and _Jesusa peccante_. These wearisome sickening little personal novels! After all, they aren’t novels at all. In every great novel, who is the hero all the time? Not any of the characters, but some unnamed and nameless flame behind them all. Just as God is the pivotal interest in the books of the _Old Testament_. But just a trifle too intimate, too _frére et cochon_, there. In the great novel, the felt but unknown flame stands behind all the characters, and in their words and gestures there is a flicker of the presence. If you are _too personal, too human_, the flicker fades out, leaving you with something awfully lifelike, and as lifeless as most people are. We have to choose between the quick and the dead. The quick is God-flame, in everything. And the dead is dead. In this room where I write, there is a little table that is dead: it doesn’t even weakly exist. And there is a ridiculous little iron stove, which for some unknown reason is quick. And there is an iron wardrobe trunk, which for some still more mysterious reason is quick. And there are several books, whose mere corpus is dead, utterly dead and non-existent. And there is a sleeping cat, very quick. And a glass lamp, that, alas, is dead. What makes the difference? _Quien sabe!_ But difference there is. And I _know_ it. And the sum and source of all quickness, we will call God. And the sum and total of all deadness we may call human.