inconceivable that Huysmans--whatever he may have said--was not ravished
by the secret beauty of his subjects and did not exult in it.

The other attribute which may be taken for granted in the novelist, as
in every artist, is passionate intensity of vision. Unless the vision is
passionately intense the artist will not be moved to transmit it. He
will not be inconvenienced by it; and the motive to pass it on will thus
not exist. Every fine emotion produced in the reader has been, and must
have been, previously felt by the writer, but in a far greater degree.
It is not altogether uncommon to hear a reader whose heart has been
desolated by the poignancy of a narrative complain that the writer is
unemotional. Such people have no notion at all of the processes of
artistic creation.




III


A sense of beauty and a passionate intensity of vision being taken for
granted, the one other important attribute in the equipment of the
novelist--the attribute which indeed by itself practically suffices, and
whose absence renders futile all the rest--is fineness of mind. A great
novelist must have great qualities of mind. His mind must be
sympathetic, quickly responsive, courageous, honest, humorous, tender,
just, merciful. He must be able to conceive the ideal without losing
sight of the fact that it is a human world we live in. Above all, his
mind must be permeated and controlled by common sense. His mind, in a
word, must have the quality of being noble. Unless his mind is all this,