It is not merely that these novels adhere to the naïve and now senescent device of assuming for the author omniscience. These stories have, that is, no stable point of view: the thoughts and the emotions of each character are divulged just as these come into being; and you are thus kept skipping, with all the agility and considerably more than the penetration of the well-named genus _pulex irritans_, from the inside of one imagined mind to the interior of another. That convention, I know, is old, it is, in fact, decrepit; but it is also childish: prose fiction really has advanced beyond such puerilities, except of course in its more popular variants and in the prevailing balderdash of the imperishable classics of prose fiction: and this convention, for me at least, destroys everywhere the illusion which I would willingly foster, destroying it for the reason that I can imagine no existence wherein I would know, even partially, what everybody was thinking and feeling. Nor is it merely that these thin-blooded novels are broken out with a rash of descriptory passages. I confess that, for one, the utmost I can do is to put up with the writer who formally and impersonally sets out to describe anything. When I am in my more amiable moods, then hurrying eyes glide by the solid stolid-looking paragraphs; I incuriously accept on faith the probability that the description is being competently attended to: and I, unvexed, pass on toward such portions of the book as may conceivably prove remunerative reading.... But far oftener am I the prey of logic and of peevishness, when I consider the malversation of time involved in every attempt to convey the true efficacy of a regarded vista, or of any observed object, by recording seriatim such attributes as, in life, we note simultaneously with plural senses. The discrepancy is the really considerable difference between a row of canned vegetable tins, howsoever painstakingly labeled, and a vegetable soup. And Lessing did so long ago dispose of the whole topic, among so many allied topics, that one would whole-heartedly like to see the passing of an examination upon the _Laokoön_ made preliminary to the securing of a license to write prose.... No: here again, I must protest, the conscientious novelist will assume a conscious point of view. The utmost he will permit himself in the way of description is to note that which would be noted, naturally, from that point of view at that especial moment. And all description will thus be converted into action, in the form, not necessarily stated outright, that so-and-so observed such-and-such phenomena. For I must here point out some obvious, if disregarded, truisms: that no scene or object can display any qualities unless there is some one to notice them; that, even then, these qualities stay undisplayed unless the potential observer have the needful interest and the time, just then, to notice them; and that to