st chapter.' Curiously enough, however, the lapse of years is far
easier to suggest than that of hours; and locomotion from Islington to
India than the act, for instance, of leaving the room. If passion enters
into the scene, and your heroine can be represented as banging the door
behind her, and bringing down the plaster from the ceiling, the thing is
easy enough, and may be even made a dramatic incident; but to describe,
without baldness, Jones rising from the tea-table and taking his
departure in cold blood, is a much more difficult business than you may
imagine. When John the footman has to enter and interrupt a conversation
on the stage, the audience see him come and go, and think nothing of it;
but to inform the reader of your novel of a similar incident--and
especially of John's going--without spoiling the whole scene by the
introduction of the commonplace, requires (let me tell you) the touch of
a master.

[7] That last, indeed, is a thing which, with all deference to
some great names in fiction, should in my judgment never be done.
It is hard enough for him as it is to simulate real life, without
the poor showman's reaching out from behind the curtain to shake
hands with his audience.

When you have got the outline of your plot, and the characters that seem
appropriate to play in it, you turn to that so-called 'commonplace
book,' in which, if you know your trade, you will have set down anything
noteworthy and illustrative of human nature that has come under your
notice, and single out such instances as are most fitting; and finally
you will select your scene (or the opening one) in which your drama is
to be played. And here I may say, that while it is indispensable that
the persons represented should be familiar to you, it is not necessary
that the places should be; you should have visited them, of course, in
person, but it is my experience that for a description of the salient
features of any locality the less you stay there the better. The man who
has lived in Switzerland all his life can never describe it (to the
outsider) so graphically as the (intelligent) tourist; just as the man
who has science at his fingers' ends does not succeed so well as the man
with whom science has not yet become second nature, in making an
abstruse subject popular.

Nor is it to be supposed that a story with very accurate local colouring
cannot be written, the scenes of which are placed in a country which th