ur feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to
understand the occult and deeper meaning of events. By dint of seeing
and meditating he has come to regard the world, facts, men, and things
in a way peculiar to himself, which is the outcome of the sum total of
his studious observation. It is this personal view of the world which
he strives to communicate to us by reproducing it in a book. To make
the spectacle of life as moving to us as it has been to him, he must
bring it before our eyes with scrupulous exactitude. Hence he must
construct his work with such skill, it must be so artful under so
simple a guise, that it is impossible to detect and sketch the plan,
or discern the writer's purpose.

Instead of manipulating an adventure and working it out in such a way
as to make it interesting to the last, he will take his actor or
actors at a certain period of their lives, and lead them by natural
stages to the next. In this way he will show either how men's minds
are modified by the influence of their environment, or how their
passions and sentiments are evolved; how they love or hate, how they
struggle in every sphere of society, and how their interests
clash--social interests, pecuniary interests, family interests,
political interests. The skill of his plan will not consist in
emotional power or charm, in an attractive opening or a stirring
catastrophe, but in the happy grouping of small but constant facts
from which the final purpose of the work may be discerned. If within
three hundred pages he depicts ten years of a life so as to show what
its individual and characteristic significance may have been in the
midst of all the other human beings which surrounded it, he ought to
know how to eliminate from among the numberless trivial incidents of
daily life all which do not serve his end, and how to set in a special
light all those which might have remained invisible to less
clear-sighted observers, and which give his book caliber and value as
a whole.

It is intelligible that this method of construction, so unlike the old
manner which was patent to all, must often mislead the critics, and
that they will not all detect the subtle and secret wires--almost
invisibly fine--which certain modern artists use instead of the one
string formerly known as the "plot."

In a word, while the novelist of yesterday preferred to relate the
crises of life, the acute phases of the mind and heart, the novelist
of to-day writes the histo