of Thackeray’s “enslaved mind,” yet admits that he tells the truth in spite of himself. “He exhausts all his feeble pathos in trying to make you sorry for the death of Col. Newcome, imploring you to regard him as a noble-hearted gentleman, instead of an insufferable old fool . . . but he gives you the facts about him faithfully.” But the denial of Thackeray’s realism goes farther than this and attacks in some instances the truthfulness of his character portrayal. Thus Mr. Whibley, who acknowledges, in general, that Thackeray was “a true naturalist,” finds that the personages in several of his novels are “drawn in varying planes.” Charles Honeyman and Fred Bayham, e.g., are frank caricatures; Helen and Laura Pendennis, and “Stunning” Warrington are somewhat unreal; Colonel Newcome is overdrawn—“the travesty of a man”; and even Beatrix Esmond, whom Mr. Brownell pronounces her creator’s masterpiece, is a “picturesque apparition rather than a real woman.” And finally comes Mr. Howells and affirms that Thackeray is no realist but a caricaturist: Jane Austen and Trollope are the true realists. Well, let it be granted that Thackeray is imperfectly realistic. I am not concerned to defend him. Nor shall I enter into this wearisome discussion of what realism is or is not, further than to say that I don’t believe the thing exists; that is, I don’t believe that photographic fiction—the “mirror up to nature” fiction—exists or can exist. A mirror reflects, a photograph reproduces its object without selection or rejection. Does any artist do this? Try to write the history of one day: everything—literally everything—that you have done, said, thought: and everything that you have seen done, or heard said during twenty-four hours. That would be realism, but, suppose it possible, what kind of reading would it make? The artist must select, reject, combine, and he does it differently from every other artist: he mixes his personality with his art, colors his art with it. The point of view from which he works is personal to himself: satire is a point of view, humor is a point of view, so is religion, so is morality, so is optimism or pessimism, or any philosophy, temper, or mood. In speaking of the great Russians Mr. Howells praises their “transparency of style, unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist’s personality should be in a portrait.” This seems to me true; though it was said long ago, the style is the man. Yet if this transparency, this impersonality is measurably attainable in the style, it is not so in the substance of the novel. If an impersonal report of life is the ideal of naturalistic or realistic fiction—and I don’t say it is—then it is an impossible ideal. People are saying now that Zola is a romantic writer. Why? Because, however well documented, his facts are _selected_ to make a particular impression. I suppose the reason why Thackeray’s work seemed