mantic hero, trying to live
bravely, chivalrously, and powerfully by dint of mere romance-fed
imagination, without courage, without means, without knowledge, without
skill, without anything real except his bodily appetites. Even in my
childhood I found in this poor devil's unsuccessful encounters with the
facts of life, a poignant quality that romantic fiction lacked. The
book, in spite of its first failure, is not dead: I saw its title the
other day in the catalogue of Tauchnitz.

Now why is it that when I also deal in the tragi-comic irony of the
conflict between real life and the romantic imagination, no critic ever
affiliates me to my countryman and immediate forerunner, Charles Lever,
whilst they confidently derive me from a Norwegian author of whose
language I do not know three words, and of whom I knew nothing until
years after the Shavian Anschauung was already unequivocally declared
in books full of what came, ten years later, to be perfunctorily
labelled Ibsenism. I was not Ibsenist even at second hand; for Lever,
though he may have read Henri Beyle, alias Stendhal, certainly never
read Ibsen. Of the books that made Lever popular, such as Charles
O'Malley and Harry Lorrequer, I know nothing but the names and some of
the illustrations. But the story of the day's ride and life's romance
of Potts (claiming alliance with Pozzo di Borgo) caught me and
fascinated me as something strange and significant, though I already
knew all about Alnaschar and Don Quixote and Simon Tappertit and many
another romantic hero mocked by reality. From the plays of Aristophanes
to the tales of Stevenson that mockery has been made familiar to all
who are properly saturated with letters.

Where, then, was the novelty in Lever's tale? Partly, I think, in a new
seriousness in dealing with Potts's disease. Formerly, the contrast
between madness and sanity was deemed comic: Hogarth shows us how
fashionable people went in parties to Bedlam to laugh at the lunatics.
I myself have had a village idiot exhibited to me as some thing
irresistibly funny. On the stage the madman was once a regular comic
figure; that was how Hamlet got his opportunity before Shakespear
touched him. The originality of Shakespear's version lay in his taking
the lunatic sympathetically and seriously, and thereby making an
advance towards the eastern consciousness of the fact that lunacy may
be inspiration in disguise, since a man who has more brains than his
fellows n