collected and studied before it could begin.

Of the art of picture there is more to be said, however. It has
appeared continually how the novelist is conscious of the thinness of
a mere pictorial report of things; for thin and flat must be the
reflection that we receive from the mind of another. There is a
constant effort throughout the course of fiction to counteract the
inherent weakness of this method of picture, the method that a
story-teller is bound to use and that indeed is peculiarly his; and
after tracing the successive stages of the struggle, in that which I
have taken to be their logical order, we may possibly draw the moral.
The upshot seems to be this--that the inherent weakness is to be
plainly admitted and recognized, and not only that, but asserted and
emphasized--and that then it ceases to be a weakness and actually
becomes a new kind of strength. Is not this the result that we have
seen? When you recall and picture an impression in words you give us,
listeners and readers, no more than a sight of things in a mirror, not
a direct view of them; but at the same time there is something of
which you do indeed give us a direct view, as we may say, and that is
the mirror, your mind itself. Of the mirror, then, you may make a
solid and defined and visible object; you may dramatize this thing at
least, this mind, if the things that appear in it must remain as
pictures only. And so by accepting and using what looked like a mere
disability in the method, you convert it into a powerful and valuable
arm, with a keen effect of its own.

That is how the story that is centred in somebody's consciousness,
passed through a fashioned and constituted mind--not poured straight
into the book from the mind of the author, which is a far-away matter,
vaguely divined, with no certain edge to it--takes its place as a
story dramatically pictured, and as a story, therefore, of stronger
stuff than a simple and undramatic report. Thus may be expressed the
reason which underlies the novelist's reluctance to _tell_ his story
and his desire to interpose another presence between himself and the
reader. It seems a good reason, good enough to be acted upon more
consistently than it is by the masters of the craft. For though their
reluctance has had a progressive history, though there are a few
principles in the art of fiction that have appeared to emerge and to
become established in the course of time, a reader of novels is left
at la