ELLESMERE. Come, let us go and see the pigs. I hear them grunting over their dinners in the farmyard. I like to see creatures who can be happy without a theory.

CHAPTER VI.

THE next time that I came over to Worth Ashton it was raining, and I found my friends in the study.

Well, Dunsford, said Ellesmere, is it not comfortable to have our sessions here for once, and to be looking out on a good solid English wet day.

DUNSFORD. Rather a fluid than a solid. But I agree with you in thinking it is very comfortable here.

books.

ELLESMERE. I like to look upon the backs of First I think how much of the owner's inner life and character is shown in his books: then perhaps I wonder how he got such a book which seems so remote from all that I know of him—

MILVERTON. I shall turn my books the wrong side upwards when you come into the study.

ELLESMERE. But what amuses me most is to see the odd way in which books get together, especially in the library of a man who reads his books and puts them up again wherever there is room. Now here is a charming party: "A Treatise on the Steam Engine" between "Locke on Christianity" and

Madame de Stael's "Corinne." I wonder what they talk about at night when we are all asleep. Here is another happy juxta position, old Clarendon next to a modern metaphysician whom he would positively loathe. Here is Sadler next to Malthus, and Horsley next to Priestly; but this sort of thing happens most in the best-regulated libraries. It is a charming reflection for controversial writers that their works will be put together on the same shelves, often between the same covers, and that in the minds of educated men, the name of one writer will be sure to recall the name of the other. So they go down to posterity as a brotherhood.

MILVERTON. To complete Ellesmere's theory, we may say that all those injuries to books which we choose to throw upon some wretched worm, are but the wounds from rival books.

ELLESMERE. Certainly. But now let us proceed to polish up the weapons of another of these spiteful

creatures.

DUNSFORD. Yes. What is to be our essay to-day, Milverton?

MILVERTON. Fiction.

ELLESMERE. Now, that is really unfortunate. Fiction is just the subject to be discussed, no, not discussed, talked over, out of doors, on a hot day, all of us lying about in easy attitudes on the grass, Dunsford with his gaiters forming a most picturesque and prominent figure. But there is nothing complete in this life. "Surgit amari aliquid:" and so

we must listen to Fiction in arm chairs.

90

FICTION.

THE influence of works of fiction is unbounded. Even the minds of well-informed people are often more stored with characters from acknowledged fiction than from history, or biography, or the real life around them. We dispute about these characters as if they were realities. Their experience is our experience: we adopt their feelings, and imitate their acts. And so there comes to be something traditional even in the management of the passions. Shakespeare's historical plays were the only history to the Duke of Marlborough. Thousands of Greeks acted under the influence of what Achilles, or Ulysses, did, in Homer. The poet sings of the deeds that shall be. He imagines the past: he forms the future.

Yet how surpassingly interesting is real life, when we get an insight into it. Occasionally a great genius lifts up the veil of history, and we see men who once really were alive, who did not always live only in history. Or, amidst the dreary page of

battles, levies, sieges, and the sleep-inducing weavings and unweavings of political combination, we come, ourselves, across some spoken or written words of the great actors of the time; and are then fascinated by the life and reality of these things. Could you have the life of any man really pourtrayed to you, sun-drawn as it were, its hopes, its fears, its revolutions of opinion in each day, its most anxious wishes attained, and then, perhaps, crystalizing into its blackest regrets, such a work would go far to contain all histories, and be the greatest lesson of love, humility and tolerance, that men had ever read.

Now fiction does attempt something like the above. In history we are cramped by impertinent facts that must, however, be set down; by theories that must be answered; evidence that must be weighed; views that must be taken. Our facts constantly break off just where we should wish to examine them most closely. The writer of fiction follows his characters into the recesses of their hearts. There are no closed doors for him. His puppets have no secrets from their master. He plagues you with no doubts, no half