" MR. NOBODY."
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOIel
Sia,—A question of the utmost importance, not only to myself, but to others who read and value the Spectator, seems to me to be opened by your kind review of my last novel," Mr. Nobody,' on the 8th inst.,—How far are we novelists to be held responsible for the opinions and ideas expressed by our characters ? In my desire to avoid a tendency against which I have been warned—of moralising too much about my characters, or usurping the role of a teacher—I never thought it possible that I should fall into an opposite pitfall, and be credited with all the raw enthusiasm and the crude theories about life which I put into the month of an earnest young thinker. I hold that a novelist should not allow himself to show any special liking or hatred for any of his own creations. They should be indepen- dent personalities to him,—their talk being such talk as would probably have fallen from their lips had they been acquaintances in real life. A novelist has no business with religious or politi- cal controversy. A Churchman should be able to draw an unbiassed and sympathetic portrait of an earnest Dissenter, and a Conservative should allow no prejudice to interfere with his faithful picture of a Radical enthusiast. In pages 74, 75, 76, 146, 147, 189, 190, 191, and others, in the third volume of my book, I have let my hero in his own person disavow any .connection with modern socialistic philosophy. To have made a " butt " of him, as some one suggests, would have seemed to me not only bad art, but unworthy of any writer who, without .distinction of party, can treat no ideas as cpntemptible by which it is proposed to grapple earnestly with that moral and physical -destitution of vast masses of our poor, which is one of the supreme questions of the day.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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