ing may entrust him with confidences extremely precious for
his craft. But such windfalls are so rare as to be negligible. From
outward symptoms he can guess something of the psychology of others. He
can use a real person as the unrecognisable but helpful basis for each
of his characters.... And all that is nothing. And all special research
is nothing. When the real intimate work of creation has to be done--and
it has to be done on every page--the novelist can only look within for
effective aid. Almost solely by arranging and modifying what he has felt
and seen, and scarcely at all by inventing, can he accomplish his end.
An inquiry into the career of any first-class novelist invariably
reveals that his novels are full of autobiography. But, as a fact, every
good novel contains far more autobiography than any inquiry could
reveal. Episodes, moods, characters of autobiography can be detected and
traced to their origin by critical acumen, but the intimate
autobiography that runs through each page, vitalising it, may not be
detected. In dealing with each character in each episode the novelist
must for a thousand convincing details interrogate that part of his own
individuality which corresponds to the particular character. The
foundation of his equipment is universal sympathy. And the result of
this (or the cause--I don't know which) is that in his own individuality
there is something of everybody. If he is a born novelist he is safe in
asking himself, when in doubt as to the behaviour of a given personage
at a given point: "Now, what should _I_ have done?" And incorporating
the answer! And this in practice is what he does. Good fiction is
autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.

The necessarily autobiographical nature of fiction accounts for the
creative repetition to which all novelists--including the most
powerful--are reduced. They monotonously yield again and again to the
strongest predilections of their own individuality. Again and again they
think they are creating, by observation, a quite new character--and lo!
when finished it is an old one--autobiographical psychology has
triumphed! A novelist may achieve a reputation with only a single type,
created and re-created in varying forms. And the very greatest do not
contrive to create more than half a score genuine separate types. In
Cerfberr and Christophe's biographical dictionary of the characters of
Balzac, a tall volume of six hundred pages, there are