You must therefore write as simply as you can--with the extreme of the simplicity that is granted to you, and you must write of subjects that spring at your throat. But why subjects appeal to you you have no means of knowing. The appeal of the subject is nevertheless the only thing that is open to your native genius--the only thing as to which you can say: “I cannot help it: that is what appealed to me!” You must never, after that, say: “I write like this because I want to,” but you must say: “I write like this because I hope it is what the unspoiled reader likes!” Having got your subject you will, if you are prudent, live with it for a long, long time before you sit down to write it. During that time you will be doing at odd moments what Conrad used to call “squeezing the guts out of it.” For it is a mistake to think that what looks like the rendering of an ordinary affair is ever an artless chronicling. Your “subject” may be just the merest nothing in the way of intrigue or plot--but to the merest nothings in human affairs all the intrigues of the universe have contributed since first this earth swung away, a drop of molten metal, from the first of all principles. Your “subject” might be no more than a child catching frogs in a swamp or the emotions of a nervous woman in a thunderstorm, but all the history of the world has gone to putting child or woman where they are and up to either subject you might lead with an epic as thrilling in its end as that of _Othello_ or an episode as poignant with absolute relief as came to the world on the eleventh of November, 1918. You have at your disposal heredity, environment, the concatenation of the effects of the one damn thing after another that life is--and Destiny who is blind and august. Those are the colours of your palette: it is for you to see that line by line and filament of colour by filament, the reader’s eye is conducted to your culminating point. That is, then, all that I have to say of the gradual progress of the English novel--to the point where it becomes the Novel. I have traced out as plainly as I could the lines of the pattern as it appears to me and the reader must use that pattern for what jumpings off of his own he chooses to make.