d rapidly
with the affair of creation, and an excusable dislike of re-creating
anything twice, thrice, or ten times over--unnatural task!--are
responsible for much of that artifice. We can all point in excuse to
Shakspere, who was a very rough-and-ready person, and whose methods
would shock Flaubert. Indeed, the amateurishness of Shakspere has been
mightily exposed of late years. But nobody seems to care. If Flaubert
had been a greater artist he might have been more of an amateur.

IV

Of this poor neglected matter of technique the more important branch is
design--or construction. It is the branch of the art--of all arts--which
comes next after "inspiration"--a capacious word meant to include
everything that the artist must be born with and cannot acquire. The
less important branch of technique--far less important--may be described
as an ornamentation.

There are very few rules of design in the novel; but the few are
capital. Nevertheless, great novelists have often flouted or ignored
them--to the detriment of their work. In my opinion the first rule is
that the interest must be centralised; it must not be diffused equally
over various parts of the canvas. To compare one art with another may be
perilous, but really the convenience of describing a novel as a canvas
is extreme. In a well-designed picture the eye is drawn chiefly to one
particular spot. If the eye is drawn with equal force to several
different spots, then we reproach the painter for having "scattered" the
interest of the picture. Similarly with the novel. A novel must have
one, two, or three figures that easily overtop the rest. These figures
must be in the foreground, and the rest in the middle-distance or in the
back-ground.

Moreover, these figures--whether they are saints or sinners--must
somehow be presented more sympathetically than the others. If this
cannot be done, then the inspiration is at fault. The single motive that
should govern the choice of a principal figure is the motive of love for
that figure. What else could the motive be? The race of heroes is
essential to art. But what makes a hero is less the deeds of the figure
chosen than the understanding sympathy of the artist with the figure. To
say that the hero has disappeared from modern fiction is absurd. All
that has happened is that the characteristics of the hero have changed,
naturally, with the times. When Thackeray wrote "a novel without a
hero," he wrote a novel with a