With respect to style, there is little to be said. Without a good style, no writer can do much; but it is impossible really to create a good style. A writer's style was born at the same time and under the same conditions that he himself was. The only rule that can be given him is, to say what he has to say in the clearest and most direct way, using the most fitting and expressive words. But often, of course, this advice is like that of the doctor who counsels his patient to free his mind from all care and worry, to live luxuriously on the fat of the land, and to make a voyage round the world in a private yacht. The patient has not the means of following the prescription. A writer may improve a native talent for style; but the talent itself he must either have by nature, or forever go without. And the style that rises to the height of genius is like the Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age. Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my productions, "Fortune's Fool." It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my present business it is to be its biographer. When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities. At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again; and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time, an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.