Phoenix; there is hardly ever more than one example of it in an age.

Upon the whole, I conceive that the best way of telling how a novel may be
written will be to trace the steps by which some one novel of mine came
into existence, and let the reader draw his own conclusions from the
record. For this purpose I will select one of the longest of my
productions, "Fortune's Fool."

It is so long that, rather than be compelled to read it over again, I
would write another of equal length; though I hasten to add that neither
contingency is in the least probable. In very few men is found the power
of sustained conception necessary to the successful composition of so
prolix a tale; and certainly I have never betrayed the ownership of such a
qualification. The tale, nevertheless, is an irrevocable fact; and my
present business it is to be its biographer.

When, in the winter of 1879, the opportunity came to write it, the central
idea of it had been for over a year cooking in my mind. It was originally
derived from a dream. I saw a man who, upon some occasion, caught a
glimpse of a woman's face. This face was, in his memory, the ideal of
beauty, purity, and goodness. Through many years and vicissitudes he
sought it; it was his religion, a human incarnation of divine qualities.

At certain momentous epochs of his career, he had glimpses of it again;
and the effect was always to turn him away from the wrong path and into
the right. At last, near the end of his life, he has, for the first time,
an opportunity of speaking to this mortal angel and knowing her; and then
he discovers that she is mortal indeed, and chargeable with the worst
frailties of mortality. The moral was that any substitute for a purely
spiritual religion is fatal, and, sooner or later, reveals its rottenness.