makes Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast" such good reading, or it may have all the elaborate discovery of motives artistic and religious in which Mr. Ruskin delights; but if your reminiscence is to be in any sense a work of art it must be marked by this insistence on a single mood.

It is in this perfectly natural manner, then, that experience is reduced from its actual heterogeneous confusion to the distinctness of form which makes it possible material for literature. The process as I have shown is closely analogous to that by which the mind conceives and understands experience: in that case the intellect somehow feels that it can apprehend all the facts in a single thought; here the memory sees experience in a series of episodes each one with its own distinct outline and imbued with its own emotional coloring.

31. In the case of the expository writing, as I have shown, this unity had to be attained without destroying the lucidity not only of the whole explanation but also of the discussion of all the single facts. In this kind of writing of which reminiscence is the type the simplification must be accomplished without losing that effect of the fulness and complexity of life which is the distinguishing feature of personal experience. To produce this illusion of life, the rush of sensations and ideas crowding along in manifold complexity, you have as your medium a thin stream of words following, as it were, in single file.

The apparent paradox disappears on a very little

examination. In the first place it is only a slow and stumbling reader whose eye does not outrun his mind; most of us have our eyes from half a line to two or three lines ahead of what we are actually assimilating, so that what we read comes before the attention very much as actual sensations do: it enters by a thin edge, as it were, perhaps the consciousness of the shape of the letters, then of the sound of the word, then finally of the full significance of the denotation and connotation. Accordingly the words always overlap more or less. Moreover, it is probable that as we read we assimilate by phrases and sentences rather than by single words. The single line of words on the page, therefore, comes to the mind as a group of ideas so bunched and overlapping that they are in some degree simultaneously before the understanding. Thus the old paradox that language is a succession of units of thought in single file which must in some miraculous way represent all sorts of contemporaneity of thought and perception at once loses a good deal of its point. I shall recur to this point when I come to Description, and there discuss the problem, which was stated by Lessing in the "Laocoon." In the mean time I shall assume that the stream of consciousness which is raised when you read a story is different only in degree of complexity from your ordinary stream of consciousness.

With this assumption we may go on to consider how it is that the imaginative literature in its typical mode of reminiscence which I am now considering, does attain its end of simplifying experience so that it

comes within the powers of language, and how in the simplification it retains its interest and poignancy.

The simplest way to come at the matter is to take such a passage as that which follows from Stevenson's “Travels with a Donkey," and note the material of which it is made up.

"I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a sudden rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon. Night after night, in my own bedroom in the country, I have given ear to this perturbing concert among the woods; but whether it was a difference in the trees, or the lie of the ground, or because I was myself outside and in the midst of it, the fact remains that the wind sang to a different tune among these woods of Gévaudan. I hearkened and hearkened; and meanwhile sleep took gradual possession of my body and subdued my thoughts and senses; but still my last waking effort was to listen and distinguish, and my last conscious state was one of wonder at the foreign clamor in my ears."

This passage is singularly full of the flavor of life. When you look at it more closely, you see that it is strikingly specific, and that what comment there is on the concrete facts of the night seems to make

it even more specific and sharply defined. Not only that, but the passage is as full of terms of actual sensation as it well can be: "as soon as the eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them" is an instance, or the "steady even rush" of the wind, or the way. in which "the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon." It would be hard to put such things into terms more strictly of sensation. Not only are the facts specifically named, but they are named in such ways as to make them the direct, ungeneralized impression of the senses. The passage deals entirely with the senses, not at all with the reflective powers of the mind. Stevenson's consciousness on this particular evening was not occupied with searching out such things as the relationships between the climate of Scotland and of France; thought was crowded out by the rich flow of the sensations from his ears, his muscles, his skin, and his drowsy brain. And when he came to write the reminiscence which should make his reader share his feelings, the sensations which thus filled his mind as he dropped off to sleep were the only things which could serve his purpose.

Moreover, the fact that sensations persist for seconds or even minutes probably adds to their potent emotional color. You can pass through a considerable course of abstract thought and afterwards have no memory of your feelings; all that remains is the sum of the reasoning through which you have passed. In a state like this of Stevenson's, on the other hand,

where search for the relations of things is dormant, the sensations which make comfort or discomfort each run so long on the surface of the stream as to give it a definite tinge of color. The varying clamor of the wind, for example, and the subtle glue between the eyelids were more than momentary facts in his consciousness: their peculiar share in his state of mind persisted until he fell asleep. Accordingly, if you wish to give to your reminiscences this continuity of life, learn to use your sensations. There is a further psychological reason for making your sensations predominate in a reminiscence. Professor James expresses it in his doctrine of the identity of the emotions and the sensations:

"For us,1 emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable. The more closely I scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have are in very truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which we ordinarily call their expression or their consequence; and the more it seems to me that if I were to become corporeally anæsthetic, I should be excluded from the life of the affections, harsh and tender alike; and drag out an existence of merely cognitive or intellectual form."

:

With the psychological results of this theory we are in no way concerned its importance here is that it reinforces and emphasizes the necessity which binds you when you write reminiscence to reduce your memories to terms of actual sensation. Certainly as

1 "Psychology," vol. ii. p. 432.