bear, and then some springtime budding, putting out leaves, breaking
into blossom, and setting its young apples, or whatever else it was
going to bear. The fruit it bore would be according to its kind, and he
might have been mistakenly expecting to grow peaches from an apple stock
when he was surprised to find apples on it, or the end of his novel
turning out other than he had forecast it.

In literature the reader's affair is with results, but the author's with
processes. Eugenio had realized this more and more distinctly, and, as
he now reflected on the appeals of those fond young correspondents of
his, it occurred to him that their confusion as to literary methods and
manners lay in their being still readers so largely and so little
authors as yet. They were dealing with the end, in their mistaken minds,
and not with the means, as they supposed. The successes which dazzled
them might very well have been written backward in some such fashion as
he had once imagined, for the end was the main thing with them, and was
the end of the story as well as the end of the book. But the true story
never ends. The close of the book is simply the point at which the
author has stopped, and, if he has stopped wisely, the reader takes up
the tale and goes on with it in his own mind.

As for the variance of the close from the forecast of it, Eugenio was
less and less dismayed by that, when in the course of time he looked
more closely at his own life and the lives of other men. Only on some
spiritual terms was there the fulfilment of forecast in them, and the
more art resembled life the less responsive it was to any hard-and-fast
design. He perceived that to find the result changing from the purpose
might very well be a proof of vitality in it, an evidence of unconscious
insight, the sort of inspiration that comes to crown faithful work with
unimagined beauty. He looked round at the great works of literary art,
and he believed that he saw in them the escape from implicit obedience
to a first intention. Only in the inferior things, the mechanical
things, could he discern obedience. In something supreme, like _Hamlet_,
say, there was everything to make him think that the processes had
educated Shakespeare as to the true nature of his sublime endeavor and
had fixed the terms of its close. Probably the playwright started with
the notion of making Hamlet promptly kill his stepfather, rescue Ophelia
from the attempt to climb out over the stre