FICTION, EARLY AND LATE. 151 



hardly cares to look at them in contemplating 

 the wonderful picture which surrounds them. 



Again, he did not understand, so to speak, 

 stage management. When he had got a lot 

 of puppets in his hands, he could not make 

 them act. And he was too self-contained to be 

 a novelist ; he could never get rid of his own 

 personality. When he succeeds in making 

 his reader realize a character, it is when that 

 character is either himself, as in " Bevis," or a 

 part of himself, as Farmer Iden in "Amaryllis." 

 The story in his earlier attempts is always 

 imitative, awkward, and conventional ; it is 

 never natural and never spontaneous. In his 

 later books he lays aside all but the mere 

 pretence of a story. The individual pictures 

 which he presents are delightful and wonder- 

 ful; they are like his short essays and articles 

 they may be read with enormous pleasure 

 but the story, what is the story? Where is 

 it? There is none. There is only the pro- 

 mise of a story not worked out left, not 

 half untold, but hardly begun, as in " After 

 London " and in " Amaryllis at the Fair.' 7 

 You may put down any of his so-called 



