tal thing, to become irrelevant
in a short story. A short story should go to its point as a man flies
from a pursuing tiger: he pauses not for the daisies in his path, or to
note the pretty moss on the tree he climbs for safety. But the novel by
comparison is like breakfasting in the open air on a summer morning;
nothing is irrelevant if the waiter's mood is happy, and the tapping of
the thrush upon the garden path, or the petal of apple-blossom that
floats down into my coffee, is as relevant as the egg I open or the
bread and butter I bite. And all sorts of things that inevitably mar the
tense illusion which is the aim of the short story--the introduction,
for example, of the author's personality--any comment that seems to
admit that, after all, fiction is fiction, a change in manner between
part and part, burlesque, parody, invective, all such thing's are not
necessarily wrong in the novel. Of course, all these things may fail in
their effect; they may jar, hinder, irritate, and all are difficult to
do well; but it is no artistic merit to evade a difficulty any more than
it is a merit in a hunter to refuse even the highest of fences. Nearly
all the novels that have, by the lapse of time, reached an assured
position of recognised greatness, are not only saturated in the
personality of the author, but have in addition quite unaffected
personal outbreaks. The least successful instance the one that is made
the text against all such first-personal interventions, is, of course,
Thackeray. But I think the trouble with Thackeray is not that he makes
first-personal interventions, but that he does so with a curious touch
of dishonesty. I agree with the late Mrs. Craigie that there was
something profoundly vulgar about Thackeray. It was a sham thoughtful,
sham man-of-the-world pose he assumed; it is an aggressive, conscious,
challenging person astride before a fire, and a little distended by
dinner and a sense of social and literary precedences, who uses the
first person in Thackeray's novels. It isn't the real Thackeray; it
isn't a frank man who looks you in the eyes and bares his soul and
demands your sympathy. That is a criticism of Thackeray, but it isn't a
condemnation of intervention.

I admit that for a novelist to come in person in this way before his
readers involves grave risks; but when it is done without affectations,
starkly as a man comes in out of the darkness to tell of perplexing
things without--as, for instance