s part,
we have been enabled to shape them so strikingly--to see precisely how
this episode has been given relief, that character made intelligible
and vivid--we at once begin to stumble on many discoveries about the
making of a novel.

Our criticism has been oddly incurious in the matter, considering what
the dominion of the novel has been for a hundred and fifty years. The
refinements of the art of fiction have been accepted without question,
or at most have been classified roughly and summarily--as is proved by
the singular poverty of our critical vocabulary, as soon as we pass
beyond the simplest and plainest effects. The expressions and the
phrases at our disposal bear no defined, delimited meanings; they have
not been rounded and hardened by passing constantly from one critic's
hand to another's. What is to be understood by a "dramatic" narrative,
a "pictorial" narrative, a "scenic" or a "generalized" story? We must
use such words, as soon as we begin to examine the structure of a
novel; and yet they are words which have no technical acceptation in
regard to a novel, and one cannot be sure how they will be taken. The
want of a received nomenclature is a real hindrance, and I have often
wished that the modern novel had been invented a hundred years sooner,
so that it might have fallen into the hands of the critical schoolmen
of the seventeenth century. As the production of an age of romance, or
of the eve of such an age, it missed the advantage of the dry light of
academic judgement, and I think it still has reason to regret the
loss. The critic has, at any rate; his language, even now, is
unsettled and unformed.

And we still suffer from a kind of shyness in the presence of a novel.
From shyness of the author or of his sentiments or of his imagined
world, no indeed; but we are haunted by a sense that a novel is a
piece of life, and that to take it to pieces would be to destroy it.
We begin to analyse it, and we seem to be like Beckmesser, writing
down the mistakes of the spring-time upon his slate. It is an obscure
delicacy, not clearly formulated, not admitted, perhaps, in so many
words; but it has its share in restraining the hand of criticism. We
scarcely need to be thus considerate; the immense and necessary
difficulty of closing with a book at all, on any terms, might appear
to be enough, without adding another; the book is safe from rude
violation. And it is not a piece of life, it is a piece of art like