udge, to use all the
possibilities of the method with intention and thoroughness, and the
full extent of the opportunity which is thus revealed is very great.
The range of method is permanently enlarged; it is proved, once for
all, that the craft of fiction has larger resources than might have
been suspected before. A novelist in these days is handling an
instrument, it may be said, the capacity of which has been very
elaborately tested; and though in any particular case there may be
good reason why its dramatic effects should not be exhausted--the
subject may need none or few of them--yet it must be supposed that the
novelist is aware of the faculties that he refuses. There are kinds of
virtuosity in any art which affect the whole of its future; painting
can never be the same again after some painter has used line and
colour in a manner that his predecessors had not fully developed,
music makes a new demand of all musicians when one of them has once
increased its language. And the language of the novel, extended to the
point which it has reached, gives a possible scope to a novelist
which he is evidently bound to take into account.

It is a scope so wide and so little explored hitherto that the novel
may now be starting upon a fresh life, after the tremendous career it
has had already. The discovery of the degree to which it may be
enhanced dramatically--this may be a point of departure from which it
will set out with vigour renewed; perhaps it has done so by this time.
Anyhow it is clear that an immense variety of possible modulations,
mixtures, harmonies of method, yet untried, are open to it if it
chooses to avail itself; and I should imagine that to a novelist of
to-day, entering the field at this late hour, the thought might be a
stimulating one. There is still so much to be done, after a couple of
centuries of novel-writing without a pause; there are unheard-of
experiments to be made. A novel such as The Ambassadors may give no
more than a hint of the rich and profound effects waiting to be
achieved by the laying of method upon method, and criticism may
presently be called on to analyse the delicate process much more
closely than I now attempt; it is to be hoped so indeed. Meanwhile it
is useful to linger over a book that suggests these possibilities, and
to mark the direction in which they seem to point.

The purpose of the novelist's ingenuity is always the same; it is to
give to his subject the highest relie