nd so forth, are such as they have been
described, which of them is the appropriate one for this or that stage
in the progress of the story to be told? The point of view gives only
a general indication, deciding the look that the story is to wear as a
whole; but whether the action is to run scenically, or to be treated
on broader lines, or both--in short, the matter of the treatment in
detail is still unsettled, though the main look and attitude of the
book has been fixed by its subject.

My analysis of the making of a few novels would have to be pushed very
much further before it would be possible to reach more than one or two
conclusions in this connection. In the handling of his book a novelist
must have some working theory, I suppose, to guide him--some theory of
the relative uses and values of the different means at his disposal;
and yet, when it is discovered how one writer tends perpetually
towards one mode of procedure, another to another, it hardly seems
that between them they have arrived at much certainty. Each employs
the manner that is most congenial to him; nobody, it may be, gives us
the material for elaborating the hierarchy of values that now we need,
if this argument is to be extended. We have picked out the modes of
rendering a story and have seen how they differ from each other; but
we are not nearly in a position to give a reasoned account of their
conjunction, how each is properly used in the place where its peculiar
strength is required, how the course of a story demands one here,
another there, as it proceeds to its culmination. I can imagine that
by examining and comparing in detail the workmanship of many novels by
many hands a critic might arrive at a number of inductions in regard
to the relative properties of the scene, the incident dramatized, the
incident pictured, the panoramic impression and the rest; there is
scope for a large enquiry, the results of which are greatly needed by
a critic of fiction, not to speak of the writers of it. The few books
that I have tried to take to pieces and to re-construct are not
enough--or at least it would be necessary to deal with them more
searchingly. But such slight generalizations as I have chanced upon by
the way may as well be re-stated here, before I finish.

And first of the dramatic incident, the scene, properly so
called--this comes first in importance, beyond doubt. A novelist
instinctively sees the chief turns and phases of his story express