m at
least a somewhat similar process. Nothing is more clear than that every
plot, worth the name, must be elaborated to its _denouement_ before
anything be attempted with the pen. It is only with the _denouement_
constantly in view that we can give a plot its indispensable air of
consequence, or causation, by making the incidents, and especially the
tone at all points, tend to the development of the intention.

There is a radical error, I think, in the usual mode of constructing a
story. Either history affords a thesis--or one is suggested by an
incident of the day--or, at best, the author sets himself to work in the
combination of striking events to form merely the basis of his
narrative---designing, generally, to fill in with description, dialogue,
or autorial comment, whatever crevices of fact or action may, from page
to page, render themselves apparent.

I prefer commencing with the consideration of an _effect._ Keeping
originality _always_ in view--for he is false to himself who ventures to
dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of
interest--I say to myself, in the first place, "Of the innumerable
effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or (more
generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present
occasion, select?" Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid
effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or
tone--whether by ordinary incidents and peculiar tone, or the converse,
or by peculiarity both of incident and tone--afterwards looking about me
(or rather within) for such combinations of events or tone as shall best
aid me in the construction of the effect.

I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written
by any author who would--that is to say, who could--detail, step by
step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its
ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to
the world, I am much at a loss to say--but perhaps the autorial vanity
has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most
writers--poets in especial--prefer having it understood that they
compose by a species of fine frenzy--an ecstatic intuition--and would
positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes,
at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought--at the true
purposes seized only at the last moment--at the innumerable glimpses of
idea that arrived not