Of the men, Theobald is well worked out (in both senses of the word).
But we know little of what went on inside him. We can fill out Christina
with her inimitable day-dreams; Theobald remains something of a
skeleton, whereas we have no difficulty at all with Dr Skinner, of
Roughborough. We have a sense of him in retirement steadily filling the
shelves with volumes of Skinner, and we know how it was done. When he
reappears we assume the continuity of his existence without demur. The
glimpse of George Pontifex is also satisfying; after the christening
party we know him for a solid reality. Pryer was half-created when his
name was chosen. Butler did the rest in a single paragraph which
contains a perfect delineation of 'the Oxford manner' twenty years
before it had become a disease known to ordinary diagnosis. The curious
may find this towards the beginning of Chapter LI. But Ernest, upon whom
so much depends, is a phantom--a dream-child waiting the incarnation
which Butler refused him for twenty years. Was it laziness, was it a
felt incapacity? We do not know; but in the case of a novelist it is our
duty to believe the worst.
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