英美經典文藝理論（簡體書）

should be all treatment and no subject. There must assuredly be something to treat; every school is intimately conscious of that. This sense of the story being the idea, the starting-point, of the novel is the only one that I see in which it can be spoken of as something different from its organic whole; and since, in proportion as the work is successful, the idea permeates and penetrates it, informs and animates it, so that every word and every punctuation - point contribute directly to the expression, in that proportion do we lose our sense of the story being a blade which may be drawn more or less out of its sheath. The story and the novel, the idea and the form, are the needle and thread, and I never heard of a guild of tailors who recommended the use of the thread without the needle or the needle without the thread. Mr. Besant is not the only critic who may be observed to have spoken as if there were certain things in life which constitute stories and certain others which do not. I find the same odd implication in an entertaining article in the Pall Mall Gazette, devoted, as it happens, to Mr. Besants lecture. The story is the thing! says this graceful writer, as if with a tone of opposition to another idea. I should think it was, as every painter who, as the time for sending in his picture looms in the distance, finds himself still in quest of a subject-as every belated artist, not fixed about his donn~e, will heartily agree. There are some subjects which speak to us and others which do not, but he would be a clever man who should undertake to give-a rule by which the story and the no - story should be known apart. It is impossible (to me at least) to imagine any such rule which shall not be altogether arbitrary.The writer in the Pall Mall opposes the delightful (as I suppose) novel of Margot la Balafree to certain tales in which Bostonian nymphs appear to have rejected English dukes for psychological reasons. I am not acquainted with the romance just designated, and can scarcely forgive the Pall Mall critic for not mentioning the name of the author, but the title appears to refer to a lady who may have received a scar in some heroic.