444 Mr. Anthony Rope Hawkins [May 7, 



the theme ? and by that, when we have discovered it, we may judge. 

 We shall find, I think, that books like these are not romances, because 

 the romance that is in them is subordinate and subsidiary. Take 

 either ' Tom Jones ' or ' Pendennis,' and the theme seems to be (I 

 need not say that I speak with diffidence) something more varied and 

 something more complicated than romance deals with. We have the 

 picture of a young man, not only passing through a great variety of 

 incidents, but himself very variously, and often very temporarily, 

 affected by them. If you judge chapter by chapter you may say here 

 and there, " This is romance " ; but if you take the book as a whole 

 you will say, " No, there is not here the abstraction, the simplicity, 

 the concentration on two or three great emotions." There is abstrac- 

 tion, of course, but not in the high degree characteristic of romance ; 

 nor, again, has any one or any two emotions the pride of place which 

 romance assigns to them. You can hardly tie the writer down to any 

 narrower theme than " The Way of the World." The reason does 

 not lie in the number of characters or of incidents, although this is a 

 probable accompaniment of themes of such a nature. Take a novel, 

 or a series of novels, no less expausive in treatment, no less crowded 

 with incidents and characters — the story of D'Artagnan and the Mus- 

 keteers. We say at once, "Here is romance.' Why? As it seems 

 to me, because, in spite of all complexity, in spite of all deviations-, 

 in spite of the elaborate and minute tracing out of purely subsidiary 

 incidents, you have running through the whole book, inspiring it all 

 and exhibited in it all, one strong, simple, imperious passion or 

 emotion, which rules the lives of the leading characters and above all 

 of the great hero. Dumas' trilogy of the Musketeers is a romance of 

 the joy of action — of doing, of using hand and brain. These men do 

 not much mind what they are at, but they must be at something, and 

 this great desire of tlieirs despotically overrides every other emotion 

 and every consideration that endeavours to oppose it. They cannot 

 keep still ; they are in love with living. This temper of theirs— 

 again, above all, of D'Artagnan's — shapes and inspires the whole 

 book, so that kings and queens and cardinals, wars and plots and 

 amours, exist only as the stage on which it may exhibit itself, and as 

 the material from which it may satisfy its monstrous appetite for 

 joyful activity. I do not say that there is nothing of this temper in 

 * Tom Jones,' or even in ' Pendennis,' but it does not set the tone of 

 the book; it is not unimpeded, it is no more than an element. Would 

 it be possible to say, in a rough attempt at a summary, that the great 

 Englishmen use their heroes to illustrate the world, but that the great 

 Frenchman uses the world to satisfy and glorify his hero ? 



But all writers of romance are not such as the creator of D'Artagnan 

 ■ — I mean, of course, of D'Artagnan as we find him in the novels. 

 They cannot wring simplicity out of an almost limitless complication 

 of persons and incidents ; they cannot follow the thread through so 

 enormous and infinitely winding a maze. The result is one which 

 was foreshadowed by the fact that the ordinary man — ourselves at 



