ecessarily appears as mad to them as one who has less. But
Shakespear did not do for Pistol and Parolles what he did for Hamlet.
The particular sort of madman they represented, the romantic
makebeliever, lay outside the pale of sympathy in literature: he was
pitilessly despised and ridiculed here as he was in the east under the
name of Alnaschar, and was doomed to be, centuries later, under the
name of Simon Tappertit. When Cervantes relented over Don Quixote, and
Dickens relented over Pickwick, they did not become impartial: they
simply changed sides, and became friends and apologists where they had
formerly been mockers.

In Lever's story there is a real change of attitude. There is no
relenting towards Potts: he never gains our affections like Don Quixote
and Pickwick: he has not even the infatuate courage of Tappertit. But
we dare not laugh at him, because, somehow, we recognize ourselves in
Potts. We may, some of us, have enough nerve, enough muscle, enough
luck, enough tact or skill or address or knowledge to carry things off
better than he did; to impose on the people who saw through him; to
fascinate Katinka (who cut Potts so ruthlessly at the end of the
story); but for all that, we know that Potts plays an enormous part in
ourselves and in the world, and that the social problem is not a
problem of story-book heroes of the older pattern, but a problem of
Pottses, and of how to make men of them. To fall back on my old phrase,
we have the feeling--one that Alnaschar, Pistol, Parolles, and
Tappertit never gave us--that Potts is a piece of really scientific
natural history as distinguished from comic story telling. His author
is not throwing a stone at a creature of another and inferior order,
but making a confession, with the effect that the stone hits everybody
full in the conscience and causes their self-esteem to smart very
sorely. Hence the failure of Lever's book to please the readers of
Household Words. That pain in the self-esteem nowadays causes critics
to raise a cry of Ibsenism. I therefore assure them that the sensation
first came to me from Lever and may have come to him from Beyle, or at
least out of the Stendhalian atmosphere. I exclude the hypothesis of
complete originality on Lever's part, because a man can no more be
completely original in that sense than a tree can grow out of air.

Another mistake as to my literary ancestry is made whenever I violate
the romantic convention that all women are an