ainst the novel, is, I admit, at the first blush
stronger. You may say: Why give us these creatures of a novelist's
imagination, these phantom and fantastic thinkings and doings, when we
may have the stories of real lives, really lived--the intimate record of
actual men and women? To which one answers: "Ah, if one could!" But it
is just because biography does deal with actual lives, actual facts,
because it radiates out to touch continuing interests and sensitive
survivors, that it is so unsatisfactory, so untruthful. Its inseparable
falsehood is the worst of all kinds of falsehood--the falsehood of
omission. Think what an abounding, astonishing, perplexing person
Gladstone must have been in life, and consider Lord Morley's "Life of
Gladstone," cold, dignified--not a life at all, indeed, so much as
embalmed remains; the fire gone, the passions gone, the bowels carefully
removed. All biography has something of that post-mortem coldness and
respect, and as for autobiography--a man may show his soul in a thousand
half-conscious ways, but to turn upon oneself and explain oneself is
given to no one. It is the natural liars and braggarts, your Cellinis
and Casanovas, men with a habit of regarding themselves with a kind of
objective admiration, who do best in autobiography. And, on the other
hand, the novel has neither the intense self-consciousness of
autobiography nor the paralysing responsibilities of the biographer. It
is by comparison irresponsible and free. Because its characters are
figments and phantoms, they can be made entirely transparent. Because
they are fictions, and you know they are fictions, so that they cannot
hold you for an instant so soon as they cease to be true, they have a
power of veracity quite beyond that of actual records. Every novel
carries its own justification and its own condemnation in its success or
failure to convince you that _the thing was so_. Now history, biography,
blue-book and so forth, can hardly ever get beyond the statement that
the superficial fact was so.

You see now the scope of the claim I am making for the novel; it is to
be the social mediator, the vehicle of understanding, the instrument of
self-examination, the parade of morals and the exchange of manners, the
factory of customs, the criticism of laws and institutions and of social
dogmas and ideas. It is to be the home confessional, the initiator of
knowledge, the seed of fruitful self-questioning. Let me be very clear
he