experimenting, at least upon Henry Esmond, and leave him to the undisputed possession of his grave, decorous and altogether delightful narrative. And yet, this habit of speculation once formed, one is tempted ever afresh to its indulgence-tempted often at the most unexpected point: as I read over the pretty drama of Romeo and Juliet, I am by some freak of the mind led to wonder what their story would sound like, told by Juliet's nurse.

It seems curious that writers themselves have not experimented in this way with their own material. Browning, indeed, the king of experimenters, did it once. But, except The Ring and the Book, I do not think of anything of the kind. And The Ring and the Book is so much more than a study in storytelling that it is as well to leave it with this passing mention.

Obviously, it makes a difference, this choice of the novelist. It is, of course, only one of the things that go to determining what a novel will be like, but it is surely one. Thackeray is always Thackeray, whether he chooses to tell his tale through the mouth of one of his characters or to step forward in his own person and talk frankly about his people as they pass before him. He is still Thackeray, yet there is a vast difference between the atmosphere of Esmond, which gives us the peaceful and deliberate reminiscences of an old man, and the atmosphere of Vanity Fair, where the author is avowedly himself, like a showman with his puppets. Perhaps it was the choice of the novelist that produced the difference, perhaps it was something inherent in the two tales, as he regarded them, that led to the choice. At all events, the choice itself is worth thinking of.

The expedient of putting a story into the mouth of one of the actors in it that is, the autobiographical method

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- has great antiquity, being at least as old as the Odyssey. Vernon Lee, in an interesting if whimsical essay of hers on 'Literary Construction,' maintains that it is essentially an expedient of immaturity. 'I have no doubt,' she says, 'that most of the stories which we have all written between the ages of fifteen and twenty were either in the autobiographical or the epistolary form... and altogether reproduced, in their immaturity, the forms of an immature period of novel-writing, just as Darwinism tells us that the feet and legs of babies reproduce the feet and legs of monkeys. For, difficult as it is to realize, the apparently simplest form of construction is by far the most difficult; and the straightforward narrative of men and women's feelings and passions, of anything save their merest outward acts the narrative which makes the thing pass naturally before the reader's mind is by far the most difficult, as it is the most perfect.'

Stevenson, whose powers as a storyteller can hardly be called immature, yet averred that it was the easiest way. He writes to Edmund Gosse, 'Yes, honestly, fiction is very difficult. . And the difficulty of according the narrative and the dialogue (in a work in the third person) is extreme. That is one reason out of half a dozen why I so often prefer the first.'

Evidently here he was thinking more of style than of construction, and one would like to know the rest of the halfdozen reasons why he preferred the first person for his stories. Perhaps we can guess at some of them. For the autobiographical form seems to settle a good many other matters besides this one of literary pitch. It prescribes in many ways the point of view. The general attitude of the actor-narrator toward the chain of events which he relates, is predetermined by his own part in those events.

But probably the strongest justification for the form is that it carries with it a certain air of genuineness. A man's own story has a value as such, as the newspaper interview testifies every day. It imposes upon us, in spite of ourselves, a prepossession in favor of its truth. Now, whatever else the novelist may wish to do, he always, first of all, wishes to create in his readers this illusion of reality. He wants to have his story seem true. He knows, indeed, that it is not true. We know it is not true. He knows that we know. And yet, he will spend months in dull research for the sake of supplying his tale with certain small earmarks of veracity that may, perchance, trick the public into a moment of doubt. He will furnish forth his story with elaborate introductions and appendices, accounting for his own share, and the publisher's share, in it, with the hope that he may be able to persuade us, at least for half an hour, that he, the author, is really and truly only the 'interested friend' to whom the papers were left; that he has really been only the recipient of a dying confession, only the discoverer of a long-hidden diary. And if he succeeds, what triumph! Is there any one who would be proof against the flattery implied in such inquiries as were aroused by Nancy Stair as to the real genealogy of the Stair family?

To this endeavor to make his story seem like the narrative of actual occurrences the novelist has been partly driven by the attitude of his readers. 'Convincing' is the critic's word now -a novel must be 'convincing.' The word is modern, the attitude which it connotes is modern. Not that readers of old did not find pleasure in giving themselves up to the story-teller. But they gave themselves up more easily than readers do now. The old storyteller began his tale smoothly enough:

'There was once a beautiful girl, who had a cruel step-mother and two wicked step-sisters.' Very good. His listeners, with a habit of acquiescence, accepted at once the beauty of the heroine, the cruelty and wickedness of the others. For them the tale was sufficiently convincing. Even the fairy godmother passed unchallenged. Who knew that fairy godmothers might not exist somewhere?

But we have lost the habit of aoquiescence. We are proving all things, and we hold fast to very little. We challenge, we scrutinize, we dissect. We have opinions about the limits of the possible, the probable, and the inevitable. And nothing really satisfies us but the inevitable.

To make his tale seem inevitable, then, is the author's ambition, and he is aware that if he is to do this he cannot get to work in the old manner. If he begins, 'There was once a beautiful girl, with a cruel step-mother and two wicked-Ah, wait!' says his reader, 'this will never do. Cruelty and wickedness are easy words to say, but the things themselves are not to be thus lightly denominated. One must discriminate. How about the step-mother's point of view? In just what way was she cruel? How did she become so? How do you know she existed at all? She does not seem to us a very real person. She is not convincing. I don't think I care to finish this story.'

The modern story-teller cannot help being conscious of this attitude on the part of his readers. Probably he has it himself, to some extent, toward his own material. What wonder, then, if, aware of the effectiveness of the expedient, he passes his story over to one of his characters, and loads upon his shoulders the burden of making it 'convincing.'

This seems, on the face of it, an easy way out. It shifts responsibility from

the author to the hero, or whoever it is who is telling the story. 'How do I know? I know because I was there. She was my step-mother.' It is the old reply of Æneas to Dido: 'Quorum pars magna fui.'

And not merely an easy way out, but often an excellent way. We have only to run over a few titles, to realize the possibilities of the autobiography as a literary form: Henry Esmond, Robinson Crusoe, Lorna Doone, Jane Eyre, Kidnapped, David Balfour, Peter Ibbetson, Harry Richmond, Joseph Vance, good books, indeed!

With such a list before us, it may seem presumptuous to hint that the autobiographical form has its limitations and its drawbacks. Yet I believe it has. For, first, there is a danger in it arising from a fact inherent in human nature: the fact that heroes and minstrels are not usually made of the same stuff. One does things; the other tells about them. The person whom adventures befall is not necessarily the one who is best able to relate them. It is not always so, of course. There are rare beings who are born with the hero and the minstrel soul bound together within them the Odysseus and the Eneas souls. For them it is very well. It was well for Odysseus, in the hall of the Phæacians, and for Eneas, in the court of Dido, to tell their adventures. They were doubly gifted, for action and for expression. But what if Achilles had tried to tell his story? Or Ajax his? Poor, inarticulate Ajax! There was plenty to tell, but what a botch he would have made of it! He is better off, he and Achilles too, in the hands of Homer.

The race of the inarticulate has not yet died out. It never will. But we would not wish to miss the telling of their stories because it must be done by other lips than theirs. The story of Quasimodo, the story of Tess, the story

of Dorothea Brooke, the story of Clara Middleton, the story of Isabel Archer, these are all, for various reasons, stories which could never have come from the characters themselves. Some of them, perhaps, could have told, but never would have done so. Others would, perhaps, but never could. Most of them probably neither would nor could. And we are glad, when we think about them, that their authors did not force them to the confessional against their natures.

Authors are not always so considerate. I have read autobiographical novels where the pleasure of the story was continually clouded by a feeling of protest that it should have been told thus. David Balfour, in certain parts of it, gives me this feeling. When he is telling his adventures it is well enough, though even there I should sometimes be glad if the story could have been told quite directly and simply by the author. I should like to know how David looked now and then, as well as what he did. And, of course, David was not the kind of fellow who would ever know how he looked; still less could he ever have written it down as part of an account of his life. But when it comes to his love affairs, and I find him writing these down in some detail, I must protest, 'Oh, David! You know you never would have told that!' And then I find myself suddenly regarding David with suspicion. I long to step into the story and pull his hair and see if it is not, after all, only a wig- to pull his nose, and see if the mask doesn't come off, disclosing, not David at all, but David's author, Stevenson.

Ah, there is the danger! The story must be told, the secrets must be laid bare secrets guarded not by big keys and heavy boulders of rock, but by the walls of impenetrable reserve in our own human nature. If they are not told, we are baffled and disappointed.

If they are told, we are critical. It is a dilemma.

Sometimes, indeed, the problem is successfully met. In Lorna Doone, for example, John Ridd, - plain John Ridd, telling his own love story, manages to steer along the narrow channel between too much reserve and too little. He loves Lorna, he is not ashamed to confess that to all the world, - but as to what he says to Lorna about it, or what she says to him, this is a matter which in his opinion is nobody's business but his and hers. And one can almost see the shy, yet humorous, half-smile and heightened color with which he backs away from a love scene and cannily edges round it, to take up the narrative again further on. One could wish that David Balfour had learned a lesson of John.

Moreover, as I have already suggested in the case of David, the autobiographical form is unsatisfactory in another way. If, on the one hand, it gives us too much of the hero-autobiographer's private soul, so that we pray for a little decent reserve, on the other hand, it often gives us too little of his public face, too little of the commonplace externals of his personality. And here again the trouble arises from certain universal facts of human experience. For we are accustomed to get at people from the outside. We look at their faces, we watch them walk, we listen to their voices, we notice what clothes they wear and how they wear them, we regard them in their goingsout and their comings-in, and after a while we arrive, or think we arrive, at a certain intimacy with what we call their souls. We say we know them. Perhaps we do, and perhaps we don't, but at any rate, such knowledge as we have is reached in this way. It is the way we are accustomed to; we know how to value and allow for its data,

how to discount its deceptions-perhaps we even like its baffling reserves.

Now, in the autobiographical novel, all this is reversed: instead of approaching the hero from the outside, we approach him from the inside. Instead of looking into his eyes, we look out of them. In a sense, doubtless, we know him better than if we had approached him through the ordinary channels, but in another sense we do not know him so well. It is too much like the way we know or rather the way we fail to know ourselves. And so, in the autobiographical novel one sometimes grows a little tired of looking from within, out. One longs to stand off and get a good plain view of the hero's nose, and his eyes. One wants to see him walk down the street, instead of walking down the street inside him.

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Authors realize this, at least by flashes, and they try to gratify us, sometimes in very amusing ways. Here is Marcelle Tinayre, for example, in Hellé, which is the autobiography of a young girl. She is beautiful, - she manages to imply that without involving herself in any breach of decorum, but she must in some way be described more fully. So the author makes her stand before a mirror in her ball-gown and set down what she sees there. The ruse is obvious. The action, which would have been natural — indeed inevitable for a person like Marie Bashkirtseff, is for Hellé entirely out of character. But what would you have? The reader must be told what she looked like.

On the other hand, such an expedient is sometimes entirely successful. There is a scene in Jane Eyre, where Jane, in a frenzy of mingled jealousy and self-martyrdom, sets herself down before her mirror and paints with remorseless fidelity her own plain face, then paints from memory a portrait of the beautiful lady whom she imagines

to be her rival in the affections of Rochester. The action is perfectly natural. I believe Jane was always looking in the glass, not because she admired herself, but because she did not. And this pricking consciousness of her own appearance pervades the whole narrative, so that one has in its perusal very little of this sense that I have been speaking of, of viewing the hero entirely from within.

This could be achieved in the fictitious autobiography of Jane, just as it was in the real autobiography of Marie Bashkirtseff; but there are types of women with whom it could not be done

women like Dorothea Brooke or Clara Middleton. Clara, struggling hopeless in the net of circumstance, yet flashing keen lights on the people about her, could never turn such light on herself. She was unaware of her own physical loveliness, her walk, her hair as it curled about her ears and neck. Call such things trifling and external if you will, yet it is through such trifling externals that some of our deepest and most instinctive impressions arise.

But if self-portraiture is not natural to all women, still less is it so to most men. In Simon the Jester, for example, we find our hero writing thus: 'I looked at him and smiled, perhaps a little wearily. One can always command one's eyes, but one's lips get sometimes out of control. He could not have noticed my lips, however.' Instantly we detect the note of falseness here. Such a man would not have carefully written down the fact that he smiled wearily, and that his friend did not notice his lips. Oscar Wilde would have been aware of such a fact about himself, and when in Dorian Grey he makes his hero run to the mirror to catch his own expression before it fades, we do not challenge it, though we may perhaps question whether Dorian Grey was

worth writing about at all. But we do not expect such things from Simon de Gex-we do not expect such things. from most men. Of course the fact was, that the author of Simon wanted us to know that Simon's smile was a weary one, and no way of making this clear occurred to him, except that of having Simon himself admit that he smiled wearily. This little passage is not a momentary slip. It is typical of the whole book, which might be used as an illustration of the way in which an unfortunate method of telling the story acts as a handicap from beginning to end. With a rather unusual and very interesting situation to set forth, the author has thrown away his chance of making it seem 'inevitable' by setting up at the start a postulate in which we can never acquiesce the postulate of Simon de Gex writing himself up.

Clearly, description of the hero by himself is dangerous tactics. Yet, where it is not attempted, we miss it. The weakness of the latter part of De Morgan's Joseph Vance is, I believe, due not entirely to the fact that his father died out of the story, but also, among other things, to the fact that Joseph himself, being grown-up, could no longer regard himself impersonally enough to make his personality vivid to us. And readers of the book, if they are at all like me, carry away from it a vivid picture of Joseph Vance the boy, but a very pale picture of Joseph Vance the man.

It is, perhaps, the endeavor to escape from some of these pitfalls that beset the autobiographical form, and yet to profit by its opportunities, which leads writers to try another expedient — that is, to let the story be told, not by the hero, but by the hero's friend. The Beloved Vagabond is done in this way, and very cleverly done. Clearly, it could never have been told by the