Nevertheless, the novelist must not, by taking sides, exhibit his preferences. He must not show his publisher as all shining benevolence and well-soaped chastity without pointing out that his fellows, the unwashed, incontinent, wastrel Villons of the world, sometimes practise Robin Hoodish generosities and sometimes smooth with their works the pillows of the agonized and sleepless. And in between the starving Chatterton and the august house of, say, Longmans, Norton, Hurst, Rees, and Co.--who did not publish Chatterton--he must place and set in motion the teeming world of averagely sensual, averagely kindly, averagely cruel, averagely honest, averagely imbecile human beings whose providentially appointed mission would seem to be to turn into the stuff that fills graveyards. So that it is not so much the function of the novelist to hold the balance straight as, dispensing with all scales or instruments for measuring, to show all the human beings of his creation going about their avocations. He has, that is to say, to render and not to tell. (If I say, “The wicked Mr. Blank shot nice Blanche’s dear cat!” that is telling. If I say: “Blank raised his rifle and aimed it at the quivering, black-burdened topmost bough of the cherry-tree. After the report a spattered bunch of scarlet and black quiverings dropped from branch to branch to pancake itself on the orchard grass!” that is rather bad rendering, but still rendering. Or if I say Monsieur Chose was a vulgar, coarse, obese and presumptuous fellow--that is telling. But if I say, “He was a gentleman with red whiskers that always preceded him through a doorway,” there you have him rendered--as Maupassant rendered him.) It was Flaubert who most shiningly preached the doctrine of the novelist as Creator who should have a Creator’s aloofness, rendering the world as he sees it, uttering no comments, falsifying no issues and carrying the subject--the Affair--he has selected for rendering, remorselessly out to its logical conclusion. There came thus into existence the novel of Aloofness. It had even in France something of a struggle for that existence and the author of _Madame Bovary_ which was the first great novel logically--and indeed passionately--to carry out this theory, had to face a criminal prosecution because in the opinion of the Government of Napoleon III a book that is not actively on the side of constituted authority and of established morality is of necessity dangerous to morals and subversive of good government.