is likely to continue for a long time to come, in spite of mental philosophers who are ready with the best receipts for avoiding all mistakes of the kind.

Our good Adam had no fine words into which he could put his feeling for Hetty; he could not disguise mystery in this way with the appearance of knowledge; he called his love frankly a mystery, as you have heard him. He only knew that the sight and memory of her moved him deeply, touching the spring of all love and tenderness, all faith and courage within him. How could he imagine narrowness, selfishness, hardness in her? He created the mind he believed in out of his own, which was large, unselfish, tender.

Here is certainly careful exposition of the character of Adam's love for Hetty, expressed with no little analytical detail. But the average reader would arrive at a fuller conception and appreciation of the strong man's passion for the weak girl by following Adam's acts and words from the time when his love first took form until it received its death-wound with Hetty's fall. Adam's visits to the Hall Farm, his hesitation, his walks through the fields, his discussions of love with Bartle Massey, his battle with Arthur, his utter prostration at the news of the child-murder, the faithful attendance at Stoniton jail all these visible details go farther to reveal the true nature of Adam's love than do all the psychologic dissertations of the author. In contrast to the foregoing, the following concrete picture of Adam's abstraction and loss of initiative impulse presents with unquestionably greater effectiveness the alteration that took place in him after Hetty's imprisonment:

An upper room in a dull Stoniton street, with two beds in it one laid on the floor. It is ten o'clock on Thursday night, and the dark wall opposite the window shuts out the moonlight that might have struggled with the light of the one dip

candle by which Bartle Massey is pretending to read, while he is really looking over his spectacles at Adam Bede, seated near the dark window.

You would hardly have known it was Adam without being told. His face had got thinner this last week: he has the sunken eyes, the neglected beard of a man just risen from a sick-bed. His heavy black hair hangs over his forehead, and there is no active impulse in him which inclines him to push it off, that he may be more awake to what is around him. He has one arm over the back of the chair, and he seems to be looking down at his clasped hands.

A striking illustration of the vividness secured by concrete presentation of character is to be found in the opening chapter of Far From the Madding Crowd, where Bathsheba Everdene not unlike Hetty in her love of self-indulges in action that reveals her frank admiration of herself as a "fair product of Nature in the feminine kind." Certainly a more vivid conception of the heroine's personality is secured from witnessing with Gabriel Oak this pantomime by the roadside than could be derived from a series of the abstractions in which the author frequently indulges.

An element of narrative coherence would seem to result from this method of presenting character through acts; for while personality is in the process of being expounded, the chronicling of the events that constitute the main thread need not be interrupted. The two processes become one. There is none of the interruption, and of the consequent incoherence, that is likely to result when direct characterization is interpolated and the succession of events, for the time being, is brought to a full stop.

b. Characterization by Speech, etc.

The second method of indirect characterization has to do with personal mannerisms, including individualities

of gesture, speech, and the like attendant upon acts. The mere presentation of personal oddities in manner and speech is, in one sense, but journeyman's work; the hand of the master becomes evident as the delineation of these externals is attended by equal clearness of internal portraiture. The criticism is often made that Dickens's creations are but lay figures, such as we see in the shop-windows-striking, indeed, highly colored, and, at a glance, rather accurate representations, but, on close examination, lacking in reality; that Mr. Carker is all teeth, Mr. Turveydrop all deportment. And perhaps nothing better illustrates characters that, together with all their oddities, may yet be human than to place over against Carker and Turveydrop Mr. Pickwick, Sarah Gamp, or Betsey Trotwood, not necessarily that these represent Dickens's highest attainment in characterization, but that they are in marked contrast to caricatures unvitalized by convincing personality. Mr. Pickwick, to be sure, is usually labeled with spectacles and black gaiters; Mrs. Gamp with umbrella, fragrant breath, and allusions to Mrs. Harris of ghostly memory; Betsey Trotwood with antipathy to donkeys: but with all their conventionalities these creations are so essentially human that they seem far more real than the Carkers, Turveydrops, and all their company.

Amateurs in narrative writing should observe that, if personal characterization- the portrayal of individuality be their purpose, the peculiarities with which they endow their creations must, in some way, contribute to that portrayal. Nothing is more simple than to indicate a squint, a glib tongue, a halting gait, ebullition of spirits, but it does not follow that we shall have as a result a Sampson Brass, an Alfred Jingle, a Quilp, or a Wilkins Micawber. Anything remotely approaching

real personality may still be lacking. Mrs. Nickleby and her prototype, Miss Bates, in Jane Austen's Emma, are, from one point of view, but mere impersonations of incoherence gone mad, yet their consistent fatuousness is almost convincing, and many a reader feels that he knows Mrs. Nickleby as well as he does Florence Dombey, that Miss Bates is no more unreal than is Emma Woodhouse or Harriet Smith. It must be admitted that the two cases cited from Dickens and Jane Austen are extreme, partaking of the nature of caricature, but there is nevertheless a structural principle involved: in rendering personage presentation objective and distinct, peculiarities of speech and dress do serve a distinct purpose; but in character portrayal external peculiarities must constantly be relegated to the category of the accidents rather than the essentials of individuality. It may serve to objectify our conception of Tommy Traddles to know that his hair was in a chronic state of ungovernable stiffness, or of Lady Kew to know that the sharpness of her tongue was dreaded by all the Newcome family; but the stiff hair and the sharp tongue are not the essentials that arouse a sense of fellowship with Traddles or of wholesome dread for the aged Countess.

The effect that personal peculiarities may have, not only in focusing our mental picture, but in bringing out and intensifying the essential self of a character, is well illustrated in the case of Major Pendennis. Pen's uncle is as clearly portrayed as is Mr. Micawber or Mr. Pecksniff, but he is, in addition, more human. Even the enthusiastic lover of David Copperfield or of Martin Chuzzlewit is compelled to admit that Micawber and Pecksniff, with all their convincingness, belong rather to the world of Dickens than to the everyday life of Canterbury or of

Salisbury. But with Thackeray's hero it is different: characteristic oddities the Major has in abundance, - his thorough-going regard for a coronet, his niceties of personal appearance and deportment, his self-respect, his blunt honesty, — yet with them all he is no wooden figure; he is as essentially human as the men of our own personal acquaintance. Tags of identification have been made to blend masterfully in with a realistic personality.

But at this point one must remember that characterization is not the principal end of narrative writing, and that it must therefore be subordinated. A story is not written for the mere sake of expounding character any more than a sermon is written for the mere purpose of exhibiting the clergyman's rich voice or his power of drawing tears, valuable as may be these persuasive gifts. Many socalled stories in recent periodical literature - especially of the undergraduate variety are not unlike the homilies that the Reverend Charles Honeyman used to deliver in Lady Whittlesea's chapel: they are composed with an eye to the exploitation of the writer's proficiency rather than for edification. The character sketch of course has its place, but the character sketch belongs to the realm of description or of exposition, as the case may be. Its purpose is to present a picture or to make clear a conception, not to set in order the details that constitute a transaction. In strict narrative, then, the patois of the French Canadian or the dialect of the plantation hand serves a legitimate purpose when the guide or the negro is a character demanded by the exigencies of the occurrence in hand. For example, in Two Gentlemen of Kentucky, James Lane Allen has a story to tell, a distinct train of occurrences, and the actors in his narrative are Colonel Romulus Fields and his old negro servant Peter. In order to present the pathos of decayed gentility and of