On the other hand, such writers as Wilde, Stevenson, Pater, and Meredith did, dealing mostly in verbal felicities or infelicities, begin rather vaguely to perceive that writing was an art. Neither Wilde nor Pater were novelists in the sense of devoting the greater part of their time or energies to the art of fiction, and Stevenson remained an avowed moralist, whilst Meredith devoted himself to large national aspirations--which have nothing to do with art. And all the four, as I have said, were essentially rather stylists _tels quels_ than anything else. When Pater, Wilde, or Meredith had succeeded in a passage in showing what clever fellows they were they were satisfied and Stevenson, if he had some conception of how to tell a story, was far more gratified if he had succeeded in producing a quaint sentence with turns of phrase after the manner of Sir Thomas Browne than intent on the fact that every sentence--nay, every word!--should carry on the effect of the story to be told. But the mere fact that writers were then beginning to pay some attention to manner rather than to matter or morals--that they were intent on being writers rather than gentlemen--that mere fact is one to excite lively gratitude in lands like ours and the job of being a novelist is one of such excruciating difficulty that it would be ungrateful to ask of pioneers that they should be more than pioneers. The effect of their propaganda almost more than of their achievements, combined with the cheapening of books and the impingement on Anglo-Saxon shores of French examples of how things should be done--for it was not until the late ’eighties that Flaubert, Maupassant, and Turgenev really produced any overwhelming effect in either England or the United States--the effect then of all these factors coming almost together was an outburst of technical effort such as can have rarely been witnessed in any other race or time. The idea that writing was an art and as such had its dignity, that it had methods to be studied and was therefore such another acknowledged craft as is shoe-making--such ideas acted for a time, in the days of the _Yellow Book_, like magic on a whole horde of English--and still more of American--writers. I have of course not here the space to go with any minuteness into the history of the _Yellow Book_ period. Founded by two Americans--Henry James and Henry Harland--in London where circumstances were certainly more favourable than they would have been in, say, New York or Boston, the _Yellow Book_ did undoubtedly promote an interest in technical matters that hardly any other periodical or Movement could have done. James was a direct pupil of Turgenev; Harland and most of the contributors to the periodical were products rather of a general “Frenchness” than the students of any one author--the products of a blend of Mallarmé, Mérimée, Murger, and Maupassant and a Quartier Latin frame of mind and personal untidiness.