Here then, to begin with, were Robert and Catharine. Yes, but Robert must be made intellectually intelligible. Closely looked at, all novel-writing is a sort of shorthand. Even the most simple and broadly human situation cannot really be told in full. Each reader in following it unconsciously supplies a vast amount himself. A great deal of the effect is owing to things quite out of the picture given--things in the reader's own mind, first and foremost. The writer is playing on common experience; and mere suggestion is often far more effective than analysis. Take the paragraph in Turguénieff's _Lisa_--it was pointed out to me by Henry James--where Lavretsky on the point of marriage, after much suffering, with the innocent and noble girl whom he adores, suddenly hears that his intolerable first wife, whom he had long believed dead, is alive. Turguénieff, instead of setting out the situation in detail, throws himself on the reader: "It was dark. Lavretsky went into the garden, and walked up and down there till dawn." That is all. And it is enough. The reader who is not capable of sharing that night walk with Lavretsky, and entering into his thoughts, has read the novel to no purpose. He would not understand, though Lavretsky or his creator were to spend pages on explaining. But in my case, what provoked the human and emotional crisis--what produced the _story_--was an intellectual process. Now the difficulty here in using suggestion--which is the master tool of the novelist--is much greater than in the case of ordinary experience. For the conscious use of the intellect on the accumulated data of life, through history and philosophy, is not ordinary experience. In its more advanced forms, it only applies to a small minority of the human race. Still, in every generation, while a minority is making or taking part in the intellectual process itself, there is an atmosphere, a diffusion, produced around them, which affects many thousands who have but little share--but little _conscious_ share, at any rate--in the actual process. Here, then, is the opening for suggestion--in connection with the various forms of imagination which enter into Literature; with poetry, and fiction, which, as Goethe saw, is really a form of poetry. And a quite legitimate opening. For to use it is to quicken the intellectual process itself, and to induce a larger number of minds to take part in it. The problem, then, in intellectual poetry or fiction, is so to suggest the argument, that both the expert and the popular consciousness may feel its force, and to do this without overstepping the bounds of poetry or fiction; without turning either into mere ratiocination, and so losing the "simple, sensuous, passionate" element which is their true life.