thought that never in his dreams had he beheld anything more strange and delicate. The beach was excellently white, the continuous barriers of trees inimitably green, the land perhaps ten feet high and the trees thirty more. Every here and there, as the schooner coasted northward, the wood was intermitted; and he could see clear over the inconsiderable strip of land (as a man looks over a wall) to the lagoon within; and clear over that, again, to where the far side of the atoll prolonged its pencilling against the morning sky. He tortured himself to find analogies. The isle was like the rim of a great vessel sunken in the waters; it was like the embankment of an annular railway grown upon with wood. So slender it seemed amid the outrageous breakers, so frail and pretty, he would scarce have wondered to see it sink and disappear without a sound, and the waves close smoothly over its descent."

Here is a very manifest difference of spirit and of purpose, and a difference which was due to no lack of sensitiveness in Darwin; for in the introduction to his book he writes:

"Every one must be struck with astonishment when he first beholds one of these rings of coral rock, often many leagues in diameter, here and there surrounded by a low verdant island, with a dazzling white shore, bathed on the outside by the foaming breakers of the ocean, and on the inside surrounding a calm expanse of water which from reflection has a bright and pale green color."

Nevertheless, his description is quite different from Stevenson's, both in spirit and in the choice of

details. When you compare them, you find that both descriptions give you concrete facts; but they give you a different set of concrete facts. Darwin chooses his facts in order to make you understand how the coral island was formed; Stevenson chooses his facts in order to give you the feeling of its beauty. Darwin is satisfying his instinct to arrange and classify the universe; Stevenson is satisfying his instinct to set forth his strong emotions.

This difference which, as I have shown, appears at the very beginnings of mental life, makes the broad line of division between the two kinds of literature,

the literature of thought and the literature of feeling. As I have already shown, all literature must be to some extent governed by both these faculties: pure thought without the color of feeling is abstract and dead; pure feeling without the controlling and formative power of thought would be incoherent and chaotic. The preponderance of one or the other, however, determines what kind of literature the product shall be. As all art is the product of the irrepressible instinct of man to tell other people what he feels or thinks about his universe, to make his fellows share his interest, his awe, his delight in his surroundings, or in his insight into the hidden laws of nature; so literature, in so far as it is anything more than a chronicle of heterogeneous facts, must be controlled and ordered by thought and colored by feeling. According to your temperament or your nature, the thought or the feeling will give the character to your work. The difference between Thackeray and George Eliot is

a case in point: both had a clear insight into human types and idiosyncracies; both felt the irony of fate in the mingling of tragedy and comedy in daily life, both found the natural expression of their convictions in story-telling: nevertheless, they fall into different classes. Thackeray in his stories puts before you men and women as they actually lived, and - for all his interpolated preaching he does not stop to explain them; he leaves them to you as they lived, and you may explain for yourself their fates and their fortunes, or, if you are careless, you may look no deeper than the bare story. George Eliot, on the other hand, uses her people as puppets to prove the inextricable interdependence of human fate, the blind rage of Nemesis, or in the modern phrase — the reaction of the organism on its environment, or the laws of cause and effect. Her attitude towards the life she represents is that of the man of science; she is stirred not so much by her feeling of the poignancy of the life about her as by the irrepressible desire to interpret it. These two tempers, which result from the dominance of one or the other of the great faculties of the human mind, run in various intermingled combinations all through literature. What you write you may write either because you cannot help trying to explain your world as it exists about you, or because you cannot help telling about your delights or your sufferings; and according as in you one or the other of these instincts dominates what you write will fall on the one or the other side of the great undivided field of literature.

4. To come back now, after this long excursion, to the point from which I started, you will remember that a rough analysis of the meaning of this term literature, shows two essentials: that the work shall bear evidence first, of a fusing unity of conception, and, second, of the pervasive personality of the writer and I have shown that these two elements are the natural products respectively of the two faculties of the mind, thought and feeling. Any untechnical classification of literature, then, will fall back on the relative preponderance of one or other of these elements in any given work. And so in practice: what you write ought to show, naturally and spontaneously, the interest which moves you, whether it be to explain your thought or to show your feelings. The whole material of your experience which you are trying to put on paper is made up of thought and feeling: the product should be such a natural mingling of the two as will most aptly and simply carry out your purpose. After simplifying the matter so much, it may seem a blind and wanton complication to turn back, as I must now do, from two categories to five. The complication, however, is only apparent. The learning of every art is really simplified by beginning with certain artificial motions: if you are learning even to box or to fence, you begin with stiff and simple movements and strokes which you can hardly recognize in the swift and flexible precision of the accomplished art. Just so when you are learning to write, you will get on much faster if you begin with problems in which your materials and your results are highly

simplified. These simple problems you will find in the old categories of the rhetoric,-Exposition, Argument, Criticism, Narrative, Description. In each of these, as I shall go on to show, the respective importance of the elements of thought and of feeling can be specifically and clearly settled; and by thus attacking each problem in its simplest form you can see much more easily and clearly how to go to work.

5. Taking in the first place, then, Exposition: its value and its interest lie in its capacity to put the facts before you so perspicuously that you can immediately and completely see their bearing on each other. It satisfies the instinct which I have spoken of, which distinguishes man from the animals, — the instinct for classifying and understanding things. A typical case is Mr. Bryce's "American Commonwealth" he came over to this country, as he tells us in his introduction, three times; and since each time he was studying constitutions and school systems, distribution of population and habits of life, all as he happened to run across them, his facts must have come to him in an entirely accidental and illogical order. To explain these facts and to reduce the jumble to order and simplicity he had to take them out of the order in which they came to him and throw them into an artificial order. By this rearrangement he made the multitude of complicated facts, which are the life of this great commonwealth, intelligible; so that after reading his book you know with some exactness what you mean when you use the term the