That this is not the final stage of the Novel is obvious; there will be developments that we cannot foresee, strain our visions how we may. There are probably--humanity being stable, change the world how it may--there are probably eternal principles for all the arts, but the applications of those principles are eternally changing, or eternally revolving. It is, for instance, an obvious and unchanging fact that if an author intrudes his comments into the middle of his story he will endanger the illusion conveyed by that story--but a generation of readers may come along who would prefer witnessing the capers of the author to being carried away by stories and that generation of readers may coincide with a generation of writers tired of self-obliteration. So you might have a world of Oscar Wildes or of Lylys. Or you might, again, have a world tired of the really well constructed novel every word of which carries its story forward: then you will have a movement towards diffuseness, backboneless sentences, digressions, and inchoatenesses. But, for the moment, the outline that I have traced for you seems to have got about as far as we ourselves have. Printed in Great Britain by Butler & Tanner Ltd., Frome and London Transcriber’s note: Italics are indicated by _underscores_. As no original book cover image is available, a cover image made by the transcriber is placed in the public domain.