ll whereas a novel may be often the product of unskilled labor.

Questions of all kinds are presenting themselves for discussion.
Has the rise of realism made romance impossible? Is there a valid
distinction between romance and romanticism? Is the short-story a
definite form, differing from the novel in purpose as well as in
length? What is the best way to tell a story,--in the third person,
as in the epic,--in the first person, as in an autobiography,--or
in letters? Which is of most importance, character or incident or
atmosphere? Is the novel-with-a-purpose legitimate? Why is it that
dramatized novels often fail in the theater? Ought a novelist to take
sides with his characters and against them, or ought he to suppress
his own opinions and remain impassive, as the dramatist must? Does a
prodigality in the invention of incidents reveal a greater imagination
in the novelist than is required for the sincere depicting of simple
characters in every-day life? Why has the old trick of inserting brief
tales inside a long novel--such as we find in "Don Quixote" and "Tom
Jones" and the "Pickwick Papers"--been abandoned of late years? How
far is a novelist justified in taking his characters so closely from
actual life that they are recognizable by his readers? What are the
advantages and disadvantages of local color? How much dialect may a
novelist venture to employ? Is the historical novel really a loftier
type of fiction than the novel of contemporary life? Is it really
possible to write a veracious novel about any other than the
novelist's native land? Why is it that so many of the greater writers
of fiction have brought forth their first novel only after they
had attained to half the allotted threescore years and ten? Is the
scientific spirit going to be helpful or harmful to the writer of
fiction? Which is the finer form for fiction, a swift and direct
telling of the story, with the concentration of a Greek tragedy, such
as we find in the "Scarlet Letter" and in "Smoke," or an ampler and
more leisurely movement more like that of the Elizabethan plays, such
as we may see in "Vanity Fair" and in "War and Peace"?

These questions, and many another, we may expect to hear discussed,
even if they cannot all of them be answered, in any consideration
of the materials and the methods of fiction. And the result of these
inquiries cannot fail to be beneficial, both to the writer of fiction
and to the reader of fiction. To the story-