In these pages I have tried to disengage the various elements of the craft, one from another, and to look at them separately; and this has involved much rude simplification of matters that are by no means simple. I have chosen a novel for the sake of some particular aspect, and I have disregarded all else in it; I could but seek for the book which seemed to display that aspect most plainly, and keep it in view from that one angle for illustration of my theme. And the result is, no doubt, that while some tentative classification of the ways of a novelist has been possible, the question that now arises, at the point I have reached, must be left almost untouched. It is the question that confronts a writer when he has possessed himself of his subject and determined the point of view from which it is to be approached. How is its development to be handled? Granted that the instruments of the craft, dramatic and pictorial and so forth, are such as they have been described, which of them is the appropriate one for this or that stage in the progress of the story to be told? The point of view gives only a general indication, deciding the look that the story is to wear as a whole; but whether the action is to run scenically, or to be treated on broader lines, or both--in short, the matter of the treatment in detail is still unsettled, though the main look and attitude of the book has been fixed by its subject. My analysis of the making of a few novels would have to be pushed very much further before it would be possible to reach more than one or two conclusions in this connection. In the handling of his book a novelist must have some working theory, I suppose, to guide him--some theory of the relative uses and values of the different means at his disposal; and yet, when it is discovered how one writer tends perpetually towards one mode of procedure, another to another, it hardly seems that between them they have arrived at much certainty. Each employs the manner that is most congenial to him; nobody, it may be, gives us the material for elaborating the hierarchy of values that now we need, if this argument is to be extended. We have picked out the modes of rendering a story and have seen how they differ from each other; but we are not nearly in a position to give a reasoned account of their conjunction, how each is properly used in the place where its peculiar strength is required, how the course of a story demands one here, another there, as it proceeds to its culmination. I can imagine that by examining and comparing in detail the workmanship of many novels by many hands a critic might arrive at a number of inductions in regard to the relative properties of the scene, the incident dramatized, the incident pictured, the panoramic impression and the rest; there is scope for a large enquiry, the results of which are greatly needed by a critic of fiction, not to speak of the writers of it. The few books