their legitimate descendants? Because we never entirely admit, many of us, that the facts of life make the whole of life. When we travel, it is not only for education, nor without hope of some challenge to our imaginations. From childhood on many of us build shy hopes on that something in the farther shadow of the wood.

178. Stronger and more widespread than the love of mystery is the homage to untrammelled generosity, even to extravagant generosity, for even Don Quixote is a lovable soul. The heroes of romance, if they are all alike, are all gentlemen. They embody our protest against a debit-and-credit estimate of life. Free from all motives to work for a living, they never seek their own advantage. The epic hero sets out for gain of some sort — cattle, lands, a golden fleece: for very earthly love; for revenge; reasonable motives. So he joys and we joy with him, in the good real world, horses and ships, eating and drinking, the good craft of men. He has comparatively little dignity of place; he could not have understood Launcelot's mortification at having to ride in a cart. He is brave brave enough to meet great odds; but he never gives odds and always takes them. The romantic hero seeks adventure for its own sake, sets himself a quest, travels and fights with no ulterior aim. Instead of seeking advantage, he delights to undertake the impossible. With him stupendous labours are paid by a rose, a token, a smile – or rather not paid, forgotten. And the patent fact that love of this pitch appeals as an ideal even to men and women unwilling to pursue it, that the thousandth repetition of the one tale of romantic love is sure of readers, means perhaps that we are all at heart romantic enough,

especially while we are young, to cherish the ideal of

romance.

179. The sense of situation, the taste for adventure, the secret revolt from the dominion of fact, irrational abnegation for love, are three strong reasons for the vitality of romance. At least equally vital is the idea of devotion to the righting of wrongs. Most of the heroes of romance are deliverers; and for every knight the vow of service at his knighting had the highest sanctions of religion. In short, romance is the literary expression of chivalry. Thus perhaps the most typical of all the medieval romances, as it was the most popular, both separately and through the attachment of it to almost all the great cycles, is the story of the Holy Grail. As every knight had his quest and every knight a damsel for whom he risked his life, so there was one greatest quest, and one transcendent reward. Every knight was sworn to a life nobler than that of common men; but not every knight might venture on this quest. He that should see the heavenly vision must be without spot of sin. The legend of the Holy Grail is the apotheosis of chivalry, and the romantic parable of the Christian life. Realism began with the beginning of literature; romance, though it appears sporadically from early times, as in some suggestions of the Phæacian episode in the Odyssey, and again in the fourth book of the Eneid, throve only after it was planted upon Christianity.

180. The characteristics of romance thus drawn from the medieval romances are not all, but they are the essential ones, the notes of romance in all time since and to-day, the reasons for its vitality. Contemporary symbolism is one aspect of what appears in another

aspect in the perennial popularity of tales of adventure. Even a detective story differs only in taste. Poe's Gold Bug, which prevails by sheer plot, is at one edge; Poe's Ligeia at the other. Between range varieties of proportion enough to justify at once the many definitions of romance and its indefinite continuance.

b. The Short-Story

181. The same two moods run through the shortstory; but in either mood the short-story is a more definite form than the novel, and it is a new form. Potentially it has existed for centuries, as in Boccaccio; Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale is a perfect short-story in verse; but the full realization of it is quite recent. The form may be said to have been set by Poe, the extraordinary vogue to have been given by the American magazine. Once recognized as a distinct form, it was brought to its finest, perhaps, in France, as in the work of Mérimée and Maupassant, and to some of its strongest effects in England, by Mr. Kipling. The shortstory is the modern expression of what Aristotle calls a simple fable"; that is, an action without revolutions or consecutive development of character. Much of its peculiar force resides in a strict interpretation, stricter than is usual with the novel, of the principle of unity. It carries the principle of selection (§ 147) to the extreme limit of omission, is in prose a simplification of life approaching the method of poetry. Though by this it is peculiarly apt to the expression of fancy and pure imagination, to symbolistic romance, it has embodied also some of the strongest realism. In fact, it has shown extraordinary scope. The narrative idea, what

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ever its nature, that is conceived as culminating swiftly, as a single pregnant situation rather than a slower development (§ 160), demands the short-story. Some novels are tiresome merely from missing the form, from mistaking a short-story idea for a novel idea; and the recent time has found the former more common than the latter.

CHAPTER VI

DESCRIPTION

1. DEFINITION: THE LIMITS OF DESCRIPTION

182. The word description has several meanings equally approved by the dictionary; but of these only one defines description as a distinct kind of composition. The description of the steam-engine in a text-book of physics, the description of a plot of land in a mortgage deed, these are obviously what we have called exposition. But Mr. Kipling's description of Engine .007, and any novelist's description of a house and grounds, these are obviously what we currently mean by description when we use the word distinctively. The distinctive mark or note, then, of description is the attempt to suggest how the thing strikes the eye or ear. There is no such attempt in the text-book of physics or the mortgage deed. The one details how the engine works, the other exactly where the land lies. Mr. Kipling's phrase of a locomotive, that it "took the eighty-foot bridge without the guard rail like a hunted cat on the top of a fence," would be as far out of place in the one as, in the other, Stevenson's "thin distant spires of pine along the edge of the hill." But these two phrases are essentially descriptive. They reveal the writer stirring the memories of familiar sights in order to suggest a new image. How closely the reader's