f we should go further back in time than
the occasion when his friend Deverell introduced him to the beautiful
daughter of a Sheffield cutler who became the immediate inspiration of
his poetry of love.

Dickens, in many novels, of which "David Copperfield" may be taken as
an example, has chosen to tell the entire life-story of his hero from
birth up to maturity. But other novelists, like Mr. Meredith in "The
Egoist," have chosen to represent events that pass, for the most part,
in one place, and in an exceedingly short stretch of time. It is by
no means certain that Mr. Meredith does not know as much about the
boyhood and youth of Sir Willoughby Patterne as Dickens knew about
the early years of David Copperfield; but he has chosen to compact his
novel by presenting only a brief series of events which exhibit his
hero at maturity. Surely Turgenieff, after writing out that _dossier_
of each of his characters to which Mr. Henry James referred, must have
known a great many events in their lives which he chose to omit from
his finished novel. It is interesting to imagine the sort of plot that
George Eliot would have built out of the materials of "The Scarlet
Letter." Probably she would have begun the narrative in England at
the time when Hester was a young girl. She would have set forth the
meeting of Hester and Chillingworth and would have analyzed the causes
culminating in their marriage. Then she would have taken the couple
overseas to the colony of Massachusetts. Here Hester would have met
Arthur Dimmesdale; and George Eliot would have expended all her powers
as an analyist of life in tracing the sweet thoughts and imperious
desires that led the lovers to the dolorous pass. The fall of Hester
would have been the major knot in George Eliot's entire narrative. It
would have stood at the culmination of the _nouement_ of her plot: the
subsequent events would have been merely steps in the denouement. Yet
the fall of Hester was already a thing of the past at the outset of
the story that Hawthorne chose to represent. He was interested only in
the after-effects of Hester's sin upon herself and her lover and her
husband. The major knot, or culmination, of his plot was therefore the
revelation of the scarlet letter,--a scene which would have been only
an incident in George Eliot's _denouement_. It will be seen from
this that any story which is extended in its implications may offer a
novelist materials for any one of several plot-