liable to become either over-eulogistic or over-critical, being subject to the author's errors of judgment or inability rightly to estimate his subject's character and motives. To execute both sides fairly and successfully, therefore, is an achievement reserved for the few masters in this work.

EXAMPLES. This treatment of biography is exemplified, with greater or less success in Plutarch's Lives, Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Carlyle's Life of Sterling, and Lewes's Life of Goethe.

Our literature contains also some notable autobiographies, among which may be mentioned Gibbon's Autobiography, Franklin's Autobiography, and the Personal Memoirs of General Grant.

2. The modern ideal of biography, however, requires that the writer efface himself as far as possible, and employ all means for making the subject tell his own story; and to this end much prominence is given to letters, journals, conversations, and the like. Such biography gains in permitting the subject to portray his own inner life. It suffers correspondingly in being less homogeneous, and generally in including much that is of very subordinate interest. It imposes also a very delicate task on the writer's taste, in excluding what would give offence, or what would present the subject in an unjust or unfortunate light.

EXAMPLES. In biographies of this class our literature is rich, and the number of creditable performances in this kind of writing is rapidly increasing. The most noteworthy ones are: Boswell's Life of Johnson, Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay, and Stanley's Life of Dr. Arnold.

A modification of this latter method of writing biography has recently been attempted by Mr. J. W. Cross, in his life of George Eliot (Marian Evans Cross); which is little more than a mosaic of extracts from her letters and journals, pieced together so as to form, as nearly as may be, a continuous narrative. It is ingenious, but its success is problematical.

Fiction. Under this head are included all the varieties of purely invented narrative, narrative free to construct and modify

its own plan, according to the requirements of an effective plot. The laws of fiction are much discussed nowadays; in the present brief glance it will be sufficient to speak of the nature of the work and of its main divisions.

1. As to the nature of the work, fiction has its peculiar liberties and limitations, which must be borne in mind.

The liberties of fiction inhere with the fact that it is written for effect. According to its object, which may be merely to entertain, as in the ordinary novel, to teach some lesson, or advocate some cause, as in the didactic novel, to portray the depths of character, as in the psychological novel, it is free to construct such a story as will embody its conception, and to group the parts by historical perspective so as to lay the stress on what is important to its end. There are no actual facts to stand in its way, by compelling insertion or omission; it is the story-teller's world, which he is at liberty to create and people according to laws of its own.

At the same time fiction has its limitations. It must preserve verisimilitude; and to this end it must deal not with the exceptional but with the probable. The maxim that "truth is stranger than fiction" is no epigram but a literal fact; and there are many things in actual experience too strange to be tolerated in an invented story.1 Fiction can incorporate only what, under given circumstances, we feel might be true; the monstrous, the lusus naturæ or lusus historia, must be left to that exceptional region - the actual - where alone they occur. Otherwise it cannot be recognized that the story is consistent with itself; it does not obey the laws that the human mind is used to.

1 "The common saying that truth is stranger than fiction should properly be expressed as an axiom that fiction ought not to be so strange as truth. A marvellous event is interesting in real life, simply because we know that it happened. In a fiction we know that it did not happen; and therefore it is interesting only as far as it is explained. Anybody can invent a giant or a genius by the simple process of altering figures or piling up superlatives. The artist has to make the existence of the giant or the genius conceivable."— Leslie Stephen, "Hours in a Library," First Series, p. 256.

2. As to the main divisions of fiction, we will here notice merely its two cardinal aspects, the romance and the novel.

Romance obeys the tendency to emphasize the liberties of fiction. It deals with scenes and events outside the sphere of commonplace life, — with adventure, mystery, striking contrasts, surprising incident; or if with common scenes, it seeks to invest them with a hue and picturesqueness not of our everyday existence. It is generally concerned not so much with minute shades of character and motive as with the more violent and elementary passions, -love, revenge, jealousy, hatred, self-sacrificing courage. It is the result of an endeavor to create an imagined world more interesting and more striking than our common round of experience.

EXAMPLES.- Scott's "Ivanhoe," Cervantes' "Don Quixote," Bulwer's "Last Days of Pompeii," Victor Hugo's "Les Misérables." Examples of stories made romantic by poetic treatment of common scenes, are found in Hawthorne's "Scarlet Letter," "House of Seven Gables," and "Marble Faun." In the preface to "The House of Seven Gables" are some interesting remarks on Romance.

The novel holds itself more strictly inside the limitations of fiction. Confining itself to the characters and manners of ordinary life, it aims merely " to hold the mirror up to nature," so that each reader may see reflected therein something parallel to his own experience. It is often concerned with finer shadings and traits of character than the romance exhibits; and these it finds in such histories as are passing every day all around us.

EXAMPLES.- George Eliot's " Adam Bede" and "Mill on the Floss"; Thackeray's "Vanity Fair” and “The Newcomes"; Howell's "Rise of Silas Lapham." The tendency at present is more to novel than to romance.

Drama. This is to be regarded as narrative wherein the characters speak for themselves, making the story, as it were, before our eyes; while all the descriptive background is portrayed by means of scenery, or incidentally through the action and dialogue.

The plot of the drama must be more rigorous and strictly progressive, less tolerant of episodes, than that of any other form of

story. Every part must contribute clearly and obviously to the completed whole, and the action must keep moving. The passions and characters, moreover, must be more sharply defined and manifest themselves by more pointed language than in the novel, partly because the spoken style demands it, and partly because they have not the benefit of the author's interpretative comments but must reveal themselves entirely through their own words.

Further, the drama must make obvious to its audience the constant working of cause to effect. It is not sufficient that an event occur; we must be able to see what previous conditions or circumstances brought it about. Consequently the element of accident is excluded from the drama; any event, to be dramatic, must have its cause, whether intended or not, in some way indicated before our eyes.1

1 For some very suggestive remarks on the distinctions between the novel and the drama, see Bulwer-Lytton, "Pamphlets and Sketches," pp. 343–352.

CHAPTER VI.

INVENTION DEALING WITH GENERALIZATIONS: EXPOSITION.

To describe objects seen and heard, or to recount occurrences, is indeed man's most primitive and spontaneous literary impulse; but for the thinking mind the observation therein involved naturally becomes the basis of something deeper. From the perception of individual things, the mind readily advances to the thought of classes of things: detecting throughout the world resemblances and contrasts, laws and principles, causes and effects, it begins to group things together, to generalize, to discover qualities essential and qualities accidental, to form, in a word, scientific conceptions of things. Thus is opened the field of notions or generalized ideas, ideas to be identified, defined, classified; and the various processes employed to set such matter forth in literary form are included under the term Exposition.

The broad scope of literary exposition is not unjustly indicated in the derivation of the term and in ordinary popular usage. By exposition people generally understand setting forth the meaning of things; and this we may regard as its fundamental office. It is not concerned primarily with establishing the truth or falsity of a thing; it seeks rather what the thing is, what is its real nature, its scope, its relations. Exposition is thus the handmaid of all accurate and clearly-cut thought. The remark is often made of disputants that they could soon come to agreement if they would define their terms: exposition devotes itself to the business of defining terms, or rather, more broadly, of defining and otherwise exhibiting ideas, as generalized in the mind.

Such work as this underlies the whole field of serious and strenuous thought, as manifested in science and didactic writing; the