THE AUTHOR'S PURPOSE
tient moralising of Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpeting and limelighting of Dickens, and even the fine and impotent analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a joyful enthusiasm that I realised the great art of Tourguenief . . . here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, who was not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside from the whole affair and letting the characters work the plot out.
But whatever a writer's purpose may be, and whatever type of literature he has chosen in which to express it, he has got to do something more than idly say to himself one fine day, "I think I will write (let us say) a sonnet about a pearl, or a novel about the beef trust,"—and then on another fine day formulates his first line or his opening sentence without the slightest idea what is coming next or where he even-
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