mself to give a perfect creative exemplification of what he wrote for
nearly a decade, is the crux of the matter. Observe, not "_might_ have
been" merely, but "have been now." The phrase might have holes picked in
it by a composition-master or -monger.[480] Thackeray is often liable to
this process. But it states an eternal verity, and so marks an essential
differentia.

This differentia is what the present writer has, in many various forms,
endeavoured to make good in respect of the novels and the novelists with
which and whom he has dealt in this book, and in many books and articles
for the last forty years and more. There are the characters who never
might or could have been--the characters who, by limp and flaccid
drawing; by the lumping together of "incompossibilities"; by slavish
following of popular models; by equally slavish, though rather less
ignoble, carrying out of supposed rules; by this, that, and the other
want or fault, have deprived themselves of the fictitious right to live,
or to have lived, though they occupy the most ghastly of all limbos and
the most crowded shelves of all circulating libraries. At the other end
of the scale are the real men and women of fiction--those whom more or
less (for there are degrees here as everywhere) you _know_, whose life
is as your life, except that you live by the grace of God and they by
that of God's artists. These exist in all great drama, poetry, fiction;
and it never would cause you the least surprise or feeling of
unfamiliarity if they passed from one sphere to the other, and you met
them--to live with, to love or to hate, to dance or to dine with, to
murder (for you would occasionally like to kill them) or to marry.[481]
But between the two--and perhaps the largest crowd of the three, at
least since novel-writing came to be a business--is a vast multitude of
figures occupying a middle position, sometimes with little real vitality
but with a certain stage-competence; sometimes quite reaching the
"might-have-been," but never the full substance of "has been" for us. To
these last, I think, though to a high division of them, do Zola's
characters belong.

Of plot I never care to say very much, because it is not with me a
wedding-garment, though I know an ugly or ill-fitting one when I see it,
and can say, "Well tailored or dress-made!" in the more satisfactory
circumstances. Moreover, Zola hardly enters himself for much competition
here. There is none in the first