f thinking
of them all, and he knows the tricks of speech of all, and the outer
garniture and daily habitudes of all. His mind seems furnished with an
instantaneous camera and a phonographic recorder in combination; and
keeping guard over this rare mental mechanism is a spirit of catholic
affection and understanding.

Finally, he is an explorer, one of the original discoverers, one of the
men who open new regions to our view. A revelation has waited for him.
He is as much the master of his English compeers in originality as
Stevenson was their master in finished craftsmanship.

VI.--UNDER FRENCH ENCOURAGEMENT--THOMAS HARDY

Within the last half-score of years an extraordinary impulse towards
freedom in the artistic representation of life has touched some of our
English writers. Thackeray, in 'Pendennis,' laments that since Fielding
no English novelist has 'dared to draw a man.' Dr. George Macdonald, in
his 'Robert Falconer,' whispers, in a sort of stage _aside_, his wish
that it were possible to be both decent and honest in the exposition of
the character of the Baron of Rothie, who is a seducer by profession.
Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of Thackeray was, that
he was a gentleman, and that his good-breeding and his manliness were
essentially of the English pattern. Dr. Mac-donald's most intense
impulse is towards purity of life, as an integral necessity for that
communion with the Eternal Fatherhood which he preaches with so much
earnestness and charm. That two such men should have felt that
their work was subject to a painful limitation on one side of it is
significant, but it is a fact which may be used with equal force as an
argument by the advocates of the old method and the adopters of the new.
It is perfectly true that they felt the restriction, but it is equally
true that they respected it, and were resolute not to break through it.
Their cases are cited here, not as an aid to argument on one side or the
other, but simply to show that the argument itself is no new thing--that
the question as to how far freedom is allowable has been debated in the
minds of honest writers, and decided in one way, long before it came to
be debated by another set of honest writers, who decided it in another.

There never was an age in which outspoken honesty was indecent. There
never was an age in which pruriency in any guise could cease to be
indecent. There never was an age when the fashion of outspoken h