plished
according to his light; the critic creates out of life that is already
subject to art.

But his work is not the less plastic for that. The impressions that
succeed one another, as the pages of the book are turned, are to be
built into a structure, and the critic is missing his opportunity
unless he can proceed in a workmanlike manner. It is not to be
supposed that an artist who carves or paints is so filled with emotion
by the meaning of his work--the story in it--that he forgets the
abstract beauty of form and colour; and though there is more room for
such sensibility in an art which is the shaping of thought and
feeling, in the art of literature, still the man of letters is a
craftsman, and the critic cannot be less. He must know how to handle
the stuff which is continually forming in his mind while he reads; he
must be able to recognize its fine variations and to take them all
into account. Nobody can work in material of which the properties are
unfamiliar, and a reader who tries to get possession of a book with
nothing but his appreciation of the life and the ideas and the story
in it is like a man who builds a wall without knowing the capacities
of wood and clay and stone. Many different substances, as distinct to
the practised eye as stone and wood, go to the making of a novel, and
it is necessary to see them for what they are. So only is it possible
to use them aright, and to find, when the volume is closed, that a
complete, coherent, appraisable book remains in the mind.

And what are these different substances, and how is a mere reader to
learn their right use? They are the various forms of narrative, the
forms in which a story may be told; and while they are many, they are
not indeed so very many, though their modifications and their
commixtures are infinite. They are not recondite; we know them well
and use them freely, but to use them is easier than to perceive their
demands and their qualities. These we gradually discern by using them
consciously and questioningly--by reading, I mean, and reading
critically, the books in which they appear. Let us very carefully
follow the methods of the novelists whose effects are incontestable,
noticing exactly the manner in which the scenes and figures in their
books are presented. The scenes and figures, as I have said, we shape,
we detach, without the smallest difficulty; and if we pause over them
for long enough to see by what arts and devices, on the author'