banter his age into calming down, and of the other to prick his into waking up.
An additional difference, and the main one, is that Butler is the bigger man in every way more searching and earnest, more constructive, more versatile, more profound. An additional resemblance is that their fiction is so entirely in the romantic field[1] that they alone of all on this list will not come up for consideration when we reach the other.
Peacock's novels[2] form probably the most monomorphic little group to be found in literature. His seven fantasies have the strong family resemblance of the seven vestal maidens in Gryll Grange. Six of the Pleiades appeared in a compact series within a fifteen-year period; and the apparently lost sister joined the constellation thirty years later than the latest preceding one.
Two of them, Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin, are in historic costume, and thus afford a chance for the inverted satire that comes from a contrast between past and present, not to the advantage of the latter. The other five are all domiciled in contemporary English house parties; in Hall, Court, Abbey, Castle, or Grange. These are not, however, the habitations of the conven-*
- ↑ With the exception of The Way of All Flesh; another instance of Butler's wider range.
- ↑ The word novel must of course be stretched if it is to include this set of fantastic fiction. But that is easily done by accepting Chesterton's dictum: "Now in the sense in which there is such a thing as an epic, in that sense there is no such thing as a novel." Charles Dickens, 114. The other alternative is the one taken by Mrs. Oliphant: "We use the word adventurer advisedly, for we cannot regard Peacock's entry into the field of fiction as by any means an authorized one. One cannot help feeling that he did not want to write novels, but that he found that he could not get at the public in any other way; * * * The consequence is that his novels are not novels in the proper sense of the word." Victorian Age of English Literature, 16. Cf. Shaw, of whose dramas a similar statement might be made.
