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, he will never, at the ultimate bar, be reckoned supreme.  That which counts, on every page, and all the time, is the very texture of his mind—­the glass through which he sees things.  Every other attribute is secondary, and is dispensable.  Fielding lives unequalled among English novelists because the broad nobility of his mind is unequalled.  He is read with unreserved enthusiasm because the reader feels himself at each paragraph to be in close contact with a glorious personality.  And no advance in technique among later novelists can possibly imperil his position.  He will take second place when a more noble mind, a more superb common sense, happens to wield the narrative pen, and not before.  What undermines the renown of Dickens is the growing conviction that the texture of his mind was common, that he fell short in courageous facing of the truth, and in certain delicacies of perception.  As much may be said of Thackeray, whose mind was somewhat incomplete for so grandiose a figure, and not free from defects which are inimical to immortality.

It is a hard saying for me, and full of danger in any country whose artists have shown contempt for form, yet I am obliged to say that, as the years pass, I attach less and less importance to good technique in fiction.  I love it, and I have fought for a better recognition of its importance in England, but I now have to admit that the modern history of fiction will not support me.  With the single exception of Turgenev, the great novelists of the world, according to my own standards, have either ignored technique