relation with the interpretative criticism, and the lines are rubbed away between them. Indeed the emphasis which I have laid on the different kinds of criticism by treating them separately is misleading. For just as any hard line between exposition and criticism or between exposition and narrative is artificial, so you will find in practice that when you sit down to write your opinion or your impression of a book, you will never think to yourself whether what you write is subjective or objective, judicial or scientific. Just as soon as criticism begins to have theories which it hesitates to override, it becomes pedantic and meaningless.

To all these modes of criticism, therefore, each of which will seem admirable and improving to various men according to their temperaments, there is in common a certain body of necessary rules and precautions. In the first place, it need hardly be said, there is the need of a thorough knowledge of the work which you are going to criticise. In all good writing thoroughness and scrupulousness as to fact are the first commandment. Moreover, from your own point of view the work of criticism will not be worth doing unless by exercise of your mental fibre it results in a clearer, more thorough thought. Your first rule, then, is to master your subject. In the second place, whatever mode of criticism. you affect, your view must be wide and impartial. Criticism is at best ephemeral enough; but when it takes the form of special pleading or is ruled by prejudice it cannot pass into oblivion too soon. The

very necessity that your views are personal should guard you against making your criticism partisan. Moreover, even in cases where you have to condemu, you must be all the more careful to preserve amenity of manner. Many disagreeable facts are tolerable if they are politely and kindly expressed; and even wholesome truths often need to be sweetened in the utterance. In every case, therefore, cultivate your sympathy. Before you either praise or condemn, be sure that you understand just what the writer or painter or composer was trying to do; and before you explain why he did what he did and failed to do something else, be sure that you can see his achievement from his own point of view. Sympathy, then, with thorough knowledge, will make your criticism reasonable.

28. THE LITERATURE OF FEELING. Introductory.In leaving Criticism to go on to Narration, we pass, as I said in the Introduction, from the kinds of writing in which the function of thought dominates to those in which thought gives way more and more to the play and power of feeling. And as before beginning to discuss explanation I stopped to examine the mental action which was to be expressed, so now I will briefly discuss this element of feeling, what we mean by it, and in general how it works.

When you look broadly at this side of literature, which includes stories, whether fiction or true, descriptions which appeal to the emotions, and the mingling of the two, you are at once struck with the great proportion of cases which either are, or pur

port to be, personal reminiscence. Moreover in the remaining cases, the whole story or description rests on the pretended assumption that what the book tells about is really a matter of fact which some one in the past has actually lived through. The essential form, then, whether explicit or implied, of this kind of literature is that it is told as if it were remembered by some one. Reminiscence, therefore, seems to be the typical form of the literature of feeling.

This selection of reminiscence as the type of all stories and descriptions will justify itself in many ways. The most important of these ways, and the only one I shall now discuss, depends on the fact that these kinds of writing are more personal than those which explain things. Since reminiscence is of necessity always personal, it gives us therefore the least complicated example of this side of literature. Since it is a record of what some man or woman has actually been through it relieves us of many difficult questions of plausibility and construction; and moreover it emphasizes the fact that the material with which these kinds of writing work is the personal experience of men.

29. Personal experience, then, of individual people is the subject matter of all this kind of writing. In psychology, as I pointed out in the Introduction, the course of experience is described as the stream of consciousness. If you will stop once more to consider this stream of consciousness you will find it a heterogeneous flow of mingled sensations, feel

ings and thoughts jumbled together in the most illogical way. Prominent on its surface will be the particular thing to which your attention is turned. Behind and under that are all sorts of things of which you are only half conscious, or almost wholly unaware, the heat of your chair under you, the light from the window, a cart rattling by in the street, the uneasy, subconscious premonition of an engagement to-morrow, a lingering glow of pleasure from the talk with a friend a few minutes ago, the inarticulate luxuries or discomforts of digestionall such things are not only really there, but often potently determine whether you are having a good time or not, the view you take of your affairs, the optimism or the pessimism of the moment. This perfectly illogical, unreasoning flow of thoughts and feelings, much of which is so purely matter of sensation that, as I shall point out, we share it with Mr. Kipling's jungle folk, is experience. Though it is simplified by forgetfulness, by vagueness of observation, and especially by unconscious crystallization into episodes, so that it seems to be a series of distinct happenings, it never is at any moment so simple and orderly and rational a thing as it stands in memory. The variety and freshness which gives it life and interest depend on this complexity and continual variety.

Now what makes this heterogeneous flow of experience material for this particular kind of literature is the fact that it is imbued with this personal warmth and intimacy. If people, and especially people of the

so-called artistic temperament, did not find the universe interesting chiefly because it impinges so constantly on their own personal experience, there would not be much story-telling. For it is the very fact that experience is to some people so thrilling, that even at its dullest, as in "Cranford" or Mr. Barrie's "Window in Thrums or in the Wetherford, Vermont, of "Fame's Little Day," it is so full of incident and of the varied colors of human nature that they cannot help trying to thrill other people with their likes and dislikes and excitements —it is this fact that in the beginning produced tribal storytellers, and now gives us Mr. Kipling and Mr. James, This warmth and intimacy of interest each man in greater or less degree finds in his own experience as it pours through his consciousness in the stream. of thought and as I have said, it is this personal warmth and vividness of your experience that makes you want to tell other people about it.

Since your material, then, is this heterogeneous, illogical rush of all sorts of thoughts and feelings, and since the variety and richness are essential qualities, the question comes up, how can it be so simplified as to be made manageable for writing; and then the further question, how can it be simplified without losing the variety and richness which alone keep it from being flat and uninteresting?

30. As a matter of fact, the crystallization of this flow of experience into such episodes as you can make stories of is wrought by the same automatic, inscrut