I represented in my study is now parcelled out; I am worth L40 or L50
to Kitty, L20 to Pisistratus, and perhaps 30s. to the children. This is
life fractional. And I cease to be an integral till once more returning
to my study, and again closing the door on all existence but my own.
Meanwhile, it is perfectly clear that to those who, whether I am in the
study or whether I am in the common sitting-room, get nothing at all
out of me, I am not worth a farthing. It must be wholly indifferent to a
native of Kamschatka whether Austin Caxton be or be not razed out of the
great account-book of human beings.

"Hence," continued my father,--"hence it follows that the more
fractional a life be--that is, the greater the number of persons among
whom it can be subdivided--why, the more there are to say, 'A very
valuable life that!' Thus the leader of a political party, a conqueror,
a king, an author, who is amusing hundreds or thousands or millions, has
a greater number of persons whom his worth interests and affects than a
Saint Simeon Stylites could have when he perched himself at the top of
a column; although, regarded each in himself, Saint Simeon, in his grand
mortification of flesh, in the idea that he thereby pleased his Divine
Benefactor, might represent a larger sum of moral value per se than
Bonaparte or Voltaire."

PISISTRATUS.--"Perfectly clear, sir; but I don't see what it has to do
with 'My Novel.'"

MR. CAXTON.--"Everything. Your novel, if it is to be a full and
comprehensive survey of the 'Quicquid agunt homines' (which it ought to
be, considering the length and breadth to which I foresee, from the slow
development of your story, you meditate extending and expanding
it), will embrace the two views of existence,--the integral and the
fractional. You have shown us the former in Leonard, when he is sitting
in his mother's cottage, or resting from his work by the little fount in
Riccabocca's garden. And in harmony with that view of his life, you have
surrounded him with comparative integrals, only subdivided by the tender
hands of their immediate families and neighbours,--your squires and
parsons, your Italian exile and his Jemima. With all these, life is,
more or less, the life natural, and this is always, more or less, the
life integral. Then comes the life artificial, which is always, more or
less, the life fractional. In the life natural, wherein we are swayed
but by our own native impulses and desires, subservient