of a work
of art have indulged in it often; thus, for instance, Stevenson gave a
glimpse of Alan Breck in _The Master of Ballantrae_, and meant to give a
glimpse of the Master of Ballantrae in another unwritten tale called
_The Rising Sun_. The habit of revising old characters is so strong in
Thackeray that _Vanity Fair_, _Pendennis_, _The Newcomes_, and _Philip_
are in one sense all one novel. Certainly the reader sometimes forgets
which one of them he is reading. Afterwards he cannot remember whether
the best description of Lord Steyne's red whiskers or Mr. Wagg's rude
jokes occurred in _Vanity Fair_, or _Pendennis_; he cannot remember
whether his favourite dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. Pendennis occurred
in _The Newcomes_, or in _Philip_. Whenever two Thackeray characters in
two Thackeray novels could by any possibility have been contemporary,
Thackeray delights to connect them. He makes Major Pendennis nod to Dr.
Firmin, and Colonel Newcome ask Major Dobbin to dinner. Whenever two
characters could not possibly have been contemporary he goes out of his
way to make one the remote ancestor of the other. Thus he created the
great house of Warrington solely to connect a "blue-bearded" Bohemian
journalist with the blood of Henry Esmond. It is quite impossible to
conceive Dickens keeping up this elaborate connection between all his
characters and all his books, especially across the ages. It would give
us a kind of shock if we learnt from Dickens that Major Bagstock was the
nephew of Mr. Chester. Still less can we imagine Dickens carrying on an
almost systematic family chronicle as was in some sense done by
Trollope. There must be some reason for such a paradox; for in itself it
is a very curious one. The writers who wrote carefully were always
putting, as it were, after-words and appendices to their already
finished portraits; the man who did splendid and flamboyant but faulty
portraits never attempted to touch them up. Or rather (we may say again)
he attempted it once, and then he failed.

The reason lay, I think, in the very genius of Dickens's creation. The
child he bore of his soul quitted him when his term was passed like a
veritable child born of the body. It was independent of him, as a child
is of its parents. It had become dead to him even in becoming alive.
When Thackeray studied Pendennis or Lord Steyne he was studying
something outside himself, and therefore something that might come
nearer and nearer. But wh