Note 4 — Chapter IV · THE METHOD OF BLUSTER

This “episode,” for Mr. Sinclair, “seems to belong to real life, to be told of a real human being with distinct individuality.” For critical readers it is a primitive “conventional” narrative, told by a writer who has absolutely no historic knowledge to communicate. Of the preaching of the Saviour he has no more to tell than of the preaching of the Baptist. Both are as purely “conventional,” so far, as an archaic statue of Hermes. Of “the freedom and variety of life” there is not a trace; Mr. Sinclair, who professes to find these qualities, is talking in the manner of a showman at a fair. The important process of making disciples resolves itself into a fairy tale: “Come and I will make you fishers of men; and they came.” A measure of “literary artifice” is perhaps to be assigned to the items of “casting a net,” “mending the net,” and “left their father in the boat with the hired servants”;4 but it is the literary art of a thousand fairy tales, savage and civilized, and stands for the method of a narrator who is dealing with purely conventional figures, not with characters concerning which he has knowledge. The calling of the first disciples in the rejected Fourth Gospel has much more semblance of reality.