artist cannot but tire of a form that is too facile; and he is ever
yearning for a grapple with stubborn resistance. He delights in technic
for its own sake, girding himself joyfully to vanquish its necessities.
He is aware that an art which does not demand a severe apprenticeship
for the slow mastery of its secrets will fail to call forth his full
strength. He knows that it is bad for the art and unwholesome for the
artist himself, when the conditions are so relaxed that he can take it
carelessly.

It was a saying of the old bard of Brittany that "he who will not answer
to the rudder must answer to the rocks"; and not a few writers of
prose-fiction have made shipwreck because they gave no heed to this
warning. Many a novelist is a sloven in the telling of his tale,
beginning it anywhere and ending it somehow, distracting attention on
characters of slight importance, huddling his incidents, confusing his
narrative, simply because he has never troubled himself with the
principles of construction and proportion with which every playwright
must needs make himself familiar. Just as the architectural students at
the Beaux Arts in Paris are required to develop at the same time the
elevation and the ground-plan and the cross-section of the edifice they
are designing, so the playwright, while he is working out his plot, must
be continually solving problems of exposition and of construction, of
contrast and of climax. These are questions with which the ordinary
novelist feels no need to concern himself, for the reading public makes
no demand on him and there is nothing urging him to attain a high
standard. It is worthy of remark that the newspaper reviewers of current
fiction very rarely comment on the construction of the novels they are
considering.

In other words, the novel is too easy to be wholly satisfactory to an