brace or group of individuals, with the germinal property and
authority. I was myself so much more antecedently conscious of my
figures than of their setting--a too preliminary, a preferential
interest in which struck me as in general such a putting of the
cart before the horse. I might envy, though I couldn't emulate,
the imaginative writer so constituted as to see his fable first
and to make out its agents afterwards. I could think so little of
any fable that didn't need its agents positively to launch it; I
could think so little of any situation that didn't depend for its
interest on the nature of the persons situated, and thereby on
their way of taking it. There are methods of so-called
presentation, I believe among novelists who have appeared to
flourish--that offer the situation as indifferent to that
support; but I have not lost the sense of the value for me, at
the time, of the admirable Russian's testimony to my not needing,
all superstitiously, to try and perform any such gymnastic. Other
echoes from the same source linger with me, I confess, as
unfadingly--if it be not all indeed one much-embracing echo. It
was impossible after that not to read, for one's uses, high
lucidity into the tormented and disfigured and bemuddled question
of the objective value, and even quite into that of the critical
appreciation, of "subject" in the novel.

One had had from an early time, for that matter, the instinct of
the right estimate of such values and of its reducing to the
inane the dull dispute over the "immoral" subject and the moral.
Recognising so promptly the one measure of the worth of a given
subject, the question about it that, rightly answered, disposes
of all others--is it valid, in a word, is it genuine, is it
sincere, the result of some direct impression or perception of