My old girl’s got several babies that are mine, But _thou_ be my spiritual concubine, Beatrice! } Laura! } Then there would have been an honest relation between all the bunch. Nobody grudges the gents their spiritual concubines. But keeping a wife and family--twelve children--up one’s sleeve, has always been recognised as a dirty trick. Which reveals how _immoral_ the absolute is! Invariably keeping some vital fact dark! Dishonorable! Here we come upon the third essential quality of the novel. Unlike the essay, the poem, the drama, the book of philosophy, or the scientific treatise: all of which may beg the question, when they don’t downright filch it; the novel inherently is and must be: 1. Quick. 2. Interrelated in all its parts, vitally, organically. 3. Honorable. I call Dante’s _Commedia_ slightly dishonorable, with never a mention of the cosy bifurcated wife, and the kids. And _War and Peace_ I call downright dishonorable, with that fat, diluted Pierre for a hero, stuck up as preferable and desirable, when everybody knows that he _wasn’t_ attractive, even to Tolstoi. Of course Tolstoi, being a great creative artist, was true to his characters. But being a man with a philosophy, he wasn’t true to his _own character_. Character is a curious thing. It is the flame of a man, which burns brighter or dimmer, bluer or yellower or redder, rising or sinking or flaring according to the draughts of circumstance and the changing air of life, changing itself continually, yet remaining one single, separate flame, flickering in a strange world: unless it be blown out at last by too much adversity. If Tolstoi had looked into the flame of his own belly, he would have seen that he didn’t really like the fat, fuzzy Pierre, who was a poor tool, after all. But Tolstoi was a personality even more than a character. And a personality is a self-conscious _I am_: being all that is left in us of a once-almighty Personal God. So being a personality and an almighty _I am_, Leo proceeded deliberately to lionise that Pierre, who was a domestic sort of house-dog. Doesn’t anybody call that dishonorable on Leo’s part? He might just as well have been true to _himself_! But no! His self-conscious personality was superior to his own belly and knees, so he thought he’d improve on himself, by creeping inside the skin of a lamb; the doddering old lion that he was! Leo! Léon! Secretly, Leo worshipped the human male, man as a column of rapacious and living blood. He could hardly meet three lusty, roisterous young guardsmen in the street, without crying with envy: and ten minutes later, fulminating on them black oblivion and annihilation, utmost moral thunder-bolts.