The recent Romantic Revival has produced many novels that have enjoyed a brief and noisy popularity; its worst effects are noticeable on the minds of readers, unduly stimulated by the constant perusal of rapid-fire fiction. Many will not read further than the fourth page, unless some casualties have already occurred. To every writer who starts with some deliberation, they shout, "Leave your damnable faces and begin." Authors who produce for immediate consumption are prepared for this; so are the more clever men who write the publishers' advertisements. An announcement of a new work by an exceedingly fashionable novelist was headed by the appetising line, "This book goes with a rush, and ends with a smash." That would hardly do as a description of _Clarissa Harlowe_, _Wilhelm Meister_, or some other classics. To a highly nervous and irritably impatient reading public, a man whose name had no commercial value in literature gravely offered in the year of grace 1906 an "ill-written autobiography" of two hundred and eighty thousand words! Well, the result is what might _not_ have been expected. If ever a confirmed optimist had reason to feel justification of his faith, Mr. De Morgan must have seen it in the reception given to his first novel. Despite the great length of Mr. De Morgan's books, and the leisurely passages of comment and rather extraneous detail, he never _begins_ slowly. No producer of ephemeral trash, no sensation-monger, has ever got under way with more speed, or taken a swifter initial plunge into the very heart of action. One memorable day in 1873, Count Tolstoi picked up a little story by Pushkin, which his ten-year-old son had been reading aloud to a member of the family. The great Russian glanced at the first sentence, "The guests began to assemble the evening before the _fête_." He was mightily pleased. "That's the way to begin a story!" he cried. "The reader is taken by one stroke into the midst of the action. Another writer would have commenced by describing the guests, the rooms, while Pushkin--he goes straight at his goal." Some of those in the room laughed, and suggested that Tolstoi himself appropriate such a beginning and write a novel. He immediately retired and wrote the first sentences of _Anna Karenina_; which is literally the manner in which that masterpiece came into being.[1] Now if one will open any of Mr. De Morgan's works, he will find the procedure that Tolstoi praised. Something immediately happens--happens before we have any idea of the real character of the agents, and before we hardly know where we are. Indeed, the first chapter of _Somehow Good_ may serve as an artistic model for the commencement of a novel. It is written with extraordinary vivacity and spirit. But the author understands better how to begin his works than he does how to end them. The close of _Joseph Vance_ is like the mouth of the Mississippi, running off into the open sea through a great variety of passages.