a canon of literature the theory has been well established by the writers of this century. French literature has gone the farthest, perhaps, but the doctrine has been well illustrated by such men as Stevenson, in his distorted and exaggerated way by Mr. Hardy, and by Mr. Kipling more naturally and unconsciously than by either. It is not only modern writers, however, who have known enough to exploit the concrete and the sensations; without going back to Shakspere, one can find even in "Clarissa Harlowe" bits of the most concrete method; and Sir Walter Scott can furnish examples which would serve a psychologist. If you will look at any passage of description or story which you remember as being particularly vivid, you will find it hard to make it more concrete, to put it into terms of more specific sensation. For when you say that it is vivid, or living, you mean that it has the concrete reality which lives in sensations. To go back to the example, you cannot think of the "subtle glue" which leaped between Stevenson's eyelids without knowing exactly how he felt, or in other words, sharing his emotions. For your purposes of a writer sensation and emotion are merely two names for the same thing.

This, then, is the secret of simplifying your experience enough to get it into a story without losing the rich flavor and fulness of feeling which makes it worth telling about: reduce everything into terms of as direct sensation as you can. When these sensations are stirred in your reader's mind, they will arouse there all the cloud of inarticulate and indefin

able feelings with which every immediate sensation is colored and vivified, all the associations vague and distinct which make the roundness and reality of life. If instead of using the specific word for the sensation you use some more abstract term, which will raise up only a pale generalization or intellectual truth, you may explain the facts, but you will lose the warmth and richness of life. To go once more to the passage from the "Travels with a Donkey," Stevenson by naming his own sensations arouses in me all the queer, half nervous, half delightful, mysterious feelings which I have had out alone in a dark windy night. These feelings are so complex and so shadowy that I could never hope to name and define them all; and if I tried it would only cumber my writing with pages of futile endeavor. Nevertheless they are as real and as palpable as the rush of the wind among the trees; and the only way to get them before my mind as I read is to name the rush of the wind and all the other sensations which first produced them in Stevenson's mind. Then these deeper feelings raise themselves spontaneously and irresistibly in my mind, surrounding the few words before my eyes with the cloud of feeling which gives them power to create in my mind warm and living realities.

In writing a reminiscence, therefore, you meet all the chief problems which underlie story-writing and description. Your material is here, more obviously than in fiction, the illogical conglomerate of thought and feeling which constitutes the stream of conscious

ness; and at the same time it is especially full of that warmth and fulness of life which it is the success of all imaginative writing to reproduce. The first problem is to simplify the confusion of the actual experience; the second is to retain the effect of warmth and fulness. As I have shown, the method of solving both problems is perfectly natural. The simplification is wrought by the same process which your memory is all the time applying to your past life: and the quickening to the warmth of life is wrought by putting your reminiscence into terms of the actual sensations which you had at the time.

These two natural processes, then, lie behind all reminiscence, and not only reminiscence, but behind all story-writing and description. They give rise to the two canons which govern all this side of literature: (1) the canon of unity, that every story or description must have its own organic structure, its own personal form, as it were; and (2) the canon of concreteness, that every story or description must be written in terms of real things and not in abstractions.

32. Narrative. As I have held that reminiscence is the typical form of the kinds of writing which appeal to the feelings and imagination of the writer, before I go on with Narrative I will examine Lessing's dictum that the fittest and the most effective field of literature is in the representation of action, and Stevenson's that "narrative is the typical mood of literature." Both assertions seem so obvious that I need do little more than refer to the passages in which they oc

cur;1 though when I come to Description I shall show reason for enlarging them. Since speech, whether written or spoken, is always moving it can best express experiences which consist of motion and of the action of things and people on each other. Just as soon as it stops to portray things as standing beside each other in time and place it attempts what at first sight seems an entire impossibility. On the other hand, if the narrative is to carry. only a bare succession of events, like the stories of the Bible, language can do incomparably better than painting or sculpture. What Lessing said about the stories and descriptions in Homer is final: the strength of Homer lay in the constant motion of his scenes, and in the simplicity of the filling in. And though the art of literature, like every other art, has widened its range and power of expression since the great days of the heroic simplicity, yet it has never with all its research and experiment found deeper and more enduring principles than those of its founders. The story of Absalom in the words of the book of Samuel, stands unsurpassed as an example both of a high type of literature and of narrative writing. What has been added by such masters as Scott and Dumas and Thackeray has increased the richness and variety of literature as an art of representation of life; but it has not made it possible for you when you are writing to usurp the peculiar capacities of color and line or of modelled 1 Lessing's theory will be found conveniently summarized in Hill's "Principles of Rhetoric," New York, 1895, p. 250. Stevenson's theory is set forth in his essay "A Humble Remonstrance" in "Memories and Portraits."

form; and it has not obscured the clear-sighted instinct of the first poets that words serve their natural function when they represent a train of thoughts and ideas, and do not try to depict in detail the shapes and colors of solid things.

This dominant truth that a story means action is not, however, merely metaphysical theory. If it were, the less space given to it here the better. If you will look back over the history of literature-I confine myself here to English literature — in order to see what prose writings still hold their own in the lists of the publishers, you will be struck by the fact that it is the simplest and least elaborated narrative. Of the writers at the dawn of the Renaissance Sir Thomas Malory with his "Morte d'Arthur" still finds publishers and readers of much variety of taste. The Bible in King James's version holds its own not only as the ultimate standard of prose style, but as the most widely read book of the language. From the period of Queen Anne the two books which are still read by people at large are "Robinson Crusoe" and "Gulliver's Travels": and to-day the taste of connoisseurs of literature as well as of the great public has returned to such stories of swift and stirring adventure as those of Stevenson and Mr. Kipling. On the other hand Mr. Meredith, for all his indubitable force, is unreadable except to the sophisticated. The ultimate tests therefore time and width of audience

have fully supported the a priori reasoning of Lessing.

In this discussion, accordingly, I shall try to base