udience round him, the listeners rely upon his word. The
voice is then confessedly and alone the author's; he imposes no
limitation upon his freedom to tell what he pleases and to regard his
matter from a point of view that is solely his own. And if there is
anyone who can proceed in this fashion without appearing to lose the
least of the advantages of a more cautious style, for him the
minstrel's licence is proper and appropriate; there is no more to be
said. But we have yet to discover him; and it is not very presumptuous
in a critic, as things are, to declare that a story will never yield
its best to a writer who takes the easiest way with it. He curtails
his privileges and chooses a narrower method, and immediately the
story responds; its better condition is too notable to be forgotten,
when once it has caught the attention of a reader. The advantages that
it gains are not nameless, indefinable graces, pleasing to a critic
but impossible to fix in words; they are solid, we can describe and
recount them. And I can only conclude that if the novel is still as
full of energy as it seems to be, and is not a form of imaginative art
that, having seen the best of its day, is preparing to give place to
some other, the novelist will not be willing to miss the inexhaustible
opportunity that lies in its treatment. The easy way is no way at all;
the only way is that by which the most is made of the story to be
told, and the most was never made of any story except by a choice and
disciplined method.

XVIII

In these pages I have tried to disengage the various elements of the
craft, one from another, and to look at them separately; and this has
involved much rude simplification of matters that are by no means
simple. I have chosen a novel for the sake of some particular aspect,
and I have disregarded all else in it; I could but seek for the book
which seemed to display that aspect most plainly, and keep it in view
from that one angle for illustration of my theme. And the result is,
no doubt, that while some tentative classification of the ways of a
novelist has been possible, the question that now arises, at the point
I have reached, must be left almost untouched. It is the question that
confronts a writer when he has possessed himself of his subject and
determined the point of view from which it is to be approached. How is
its development to be handled? Granted that the instruments of the
craft, dramatic and pictorial a