And the trouble with the English nuvvelist from Fielding to Meredith is that not one of them cares whether you quite believe in their characters or not. If you had told Flaubert or Conrad in the midst of their passionate composings that you were not convinced of the reality of Homais or Tuan Jim, as like as not they would have called you out and shot you, and in similar circumstances Richardson would have showed himself extremely disagreeable. But Fielding, Thackeray, or Meredith would have cared relatively little about that, though any one of them would have knocked you down if they could, supposing you had suggested that he was not a “gentleman.” So would any English novelist to-day. That of course is admirable in its effect on Anglo-Saxon literary-social life where anyone taking pen in hand becomes _ipso fatso_ an esquire for all users of type-writing machines. But it is bitter bad for the English novel. It is bitter bad for the English novel because--as is the case with all human enterprises--the art of the novel is so difficult a thing that unless a man’s whole energies are given to it he had much better otherwise occupy himself. For if Shakespeare’s ambitions for coat-armour had antedated instead of coming after _The Tempest_, where should we be to-day? We have to thank our stars that he was probably first a lousy, adulterous, poaching scoundrel--like Villon! The lot of the novelist is, in fact, hard--but not harder than that of any other man. If you put it to bakers, tram-conductors, politicians, or musicians that they must be first bakers and the rest and then gentlemen, they will sigh, but admit it. It is almost only the English novelist who will aspire at being first gentleman and then craftsman--or even not craftsman at all since it is not really gentlemanly to think of being anything but a gentleman. This is an incisive way of putting a truth that might perhaps be more wrapped up in social or material generalizations, but it is none the less a hard truth, and if you consider the case of Fielding, connected with the best families, placeman and diplomatist in a small way, and compare him with Smollett who was socially nothing at all with no chance of a change, you will see that truth all the more clearly. God forbid that I should say anything really condemnatory of any book by any brother-novelist, alive or dead. One is here to commend all that one can commend and to leave the rest alone. But there are few books that I more cordially dislike than _Tom Jones_. That is no critical pronouncement but merely a statement of a personal prejudice: one may dislike grape-fruit and yet acknowledge its admirable qualities, or one may, as I do, dislike the quality of goose-flesh that reading Mr. George Moore will confer on one’s skin and yet acknowledge Mr. Moore as easily the greatest of living technicians.