t speaker
is the most addicted to preaching. Does he not stop perpetually in
his story and begin to preach to you? When he ought to be engaged with
business, is he not for ever taking the Muse by the sleeve, and plaguing
her with some of his cynical sermons? I cry peccavi loudly and heartily.
I tell you I would like to be able to write a story which should show no
egotism whatever--in which there should be no reflections, no cynicism,
no vulgarity (and so forth), but an incident in every other page, a
villain, a battle, a mystery in every chapter. I should like to be able
to feed a reader so spicily as to leave him hungering and thirsting for
more at the end of every monthly meal.

Alexandre Dumas describes himself, when inventing the plan of a work, as
lying silent on his back for two whole days on the deck of a yacht in a
Mediterranean port. At the end of the two days he arose and called for
dinner. In those two days he had built his plot. He had moulded a
mighty clay, to be cast presently in perennial brass. The chapters, the
characters, the incidents, the combinations were all arranged in the
artist's brain ere he set a pen to paper. My Pegasus won't fly, so as
to let me survey the field below me. He has no wings, he is blind of
one eye certainly, he is restive, stubborn, slow; crops a hedge when he
ought to be galloping, or gallops when he ought to be quiet. He never
will show off when I want him. Sometimes he goes at a pace which
surprises me. Sometimes, when I most wish him to make the running, the
brute turns restive, and I am obliged to let him take his own time. I
wonder do other novel-writers experience this fatalism? They MUST go
a certain way, in spite of themselves. I have been surprised at the
observations made by some of my characters. It seems as if an occult
Power was moving the pen. The personage does or says something, and
I ask, how the dickens did he come to think of that? Every man has
remarked in dreams, the vast dramatic power which is sometimes evinced;
I won't say the surprising power, for nothing does surprise you in
dreams. But those strange characters you meet make instant observations
of which you never can have thought previously. In like manner, the
imagination foretells things. We spake anon of the inflated style of
some writers. What also if there is an AFFLATED style,--when a writer is
like a Pythoness on her oracle tripod, and mighty words, words which
he cannot help, come blowing, a