who may be seeking details regarding Lockhart himself or his personal style of expression. With the autobiography, however, it is radically different. Attention is now focused upon the writer and upon the characteristics of his individuality, rather than upon the externals of his life-story. We are interested in the writer's portrait of himself; that is, in him not as seen through the eyes of the world but as reflected from within.

In her extensive work The Autobiography, Mrs. Anna Robeson Burr finds her definition of this phase of narrative writing in the preface of Marie Bashkirtsev's Journal d'une Jeune Artiste in the following passage:

If I should not live long enough to become famous, this journal will be interesting to psychologists. The record of a woman's life, written down day by day, without any attempt at concealment, as if no one in the world were to read it, yet with the purpose of being read, is always interesting. If this book is not the exact, the absolute, the strict truth, it has no raison d'être.

In this passage, Mrs. Burr tells us, two elements are at once evident, —both of which we have already found to be essential to historical writing: (a) the attempt at impartial chronicling of fact, and (b) the endeavor so to phrase the thought that it shall be read, that is, shall secure something of the permanence that belongs to literature. Absolute ingenuousness, then, being a prerequisite to effective autobiography, it is evident that the impulse with which the composition takes rise will have no little weight in determining its value. And the autobiographical motives are numerous. Mrs. Burr, for example, has distinguished no less than thirteen, such as financial return, the uses of posterity, religious witness, the mere pleasure of recalling the past, interest in self

study, the interests of science. It is not difficult to see that, with these impulses, there will be a difference in the resulting truthfulness of the self-portrayal, and consequently in the biographical value of the work. The writer who, like the traveler, being desirous merely of acquainting his reader with strange conditions of men and manners, casts his narrative in autobiographical form, will, almost of necessity, sacrifice the first of the principles that Mrs. Burr has declared essential to the type, and will devote greater attention to the second. The value of the autobiographic narrative will thus depend largely on objective considerations rather than on subjective, as it should to secure the greatest value.

It is clear, too, in view of the ultimate purpose of the autobiography, why abridgments by other hands than those of the autobiographer possess little ultimate value. What the editor shall omit, what he shall retain, must depend upon his taste, upon his judgment of the personality incorporated in the self-revelation. And the editor's judgment is the very thing that, autobiographically, the reader cares nothing about. It introduces an element wholly alien to the very nature of the autobiographic type.

In common with history, all biographical writing is free to make use of all the adjuncts of narration. The environment amidst which a character grows to maturity, the complexities that combine to make up the unity that distinguish the individual, the various episodes that, in coherent train, culminate with the close of a career, - all these are ready to the hand of the biographer, whether he chronicle the life-story of another or whether, seeing with "the inward eye," he record the thoughts that are known only to himself. One difference in proportion, however, we may note before dis

missing the subject: in history the elements of setting and character are but accessory, and therefore subordinate to the series of actual events. In other words, "the story is the thing." But with biographical narrative, and particularly with autobiography, the element of characterization moves up into first place. Background and action are but contributory. The Man himself becomes supreme.

II. THE NARRATIVE OF IMAGINATION

The Novel

The term novel is as familiar as the term literature or style or criticism, and is often used with about the same degree of exactness in denotation. Attempts at definition have frequently been made by writers on the art of fiction as well as by novelists themselves, and it is interesting to note how the various results throw stress upon widely differing elements. One writer will emphasize amusement and mental relaxation as fundamental; another will specify the passion of love as the essential motive; a third will insist upon the realistic reproduction of actual life; a fourth, that the narrative be morally instructive; and still a fifth, that there be a conscientious and accurate portrayal of character.1 An interesting phenomenon attendant upon these various attempts to define the term novel is that, as they become more and more modern, the element of character portrayal becomes increasingly important. This is quite in keeping with the trend from objective to subjective characterization already referred to in chapter v. In general, however, the definitions of one generation differ

1 For a full discussion of this matter see Horne's Technique of the Novel, chap. II.

so widely from those of another that what an eighteenthcentury writer would unhesitatingly term a "novel" would, in our time, seem to demand quite different classification.

This changing point of view as to the exact nature of the novel is further shown by a marked difference of opinion as to what shall be honored as the first novel. The rank of priority has been awarded to The Amadis of Gaul (1470 ?), to Madame Lafayette's Princess of Clèves (1678), to Marivaux's Marianne (about 1731), to Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), and to Richardson's Pamela (1740). Here, of course, the variation in judgment results from lack of unanimity among critics as to the basic essentials of the novel-type. Professor Horne, in his Technique of the Novel, has thus summed up these various essentials:

A novel, then, consists of the gathering of a single series of human, that is to say, emotional events from out the vast whirl of loosely related incidents which we call "the world." It endeavors to trace a series of causes to their series of effects. Rejecting all the intervening masses of irrelevant matter which make the lessons of life so hard to read, the novel points, or should point as clearly as it can, the winding of the road down which some soul has traveled, the goal which, if another mortal follow the same route, he also is most likely to reach. “Quo Vadis" should be the title not of one story, but of all.1

In that it seeks to "trace a series of causes to their series to effects" the novel must possess plot. In that this series shall be one of “human" and "emotional" events, the novel must include characterization. And in that it shall "point as clearly as it can the winding of the road down which some soul has traveled," the novel may util

1 Horne's Technique of the Novel. By permission of Harper and Brothers. Copyright, 1908, by Harper and Brothers.

ize setting and descriptive detail. Furthermore style — the personal element in composition - will certainly play an important rôle, if the novel is to portray with effectiveness the course of individual growth or decay.

Finally, it will be noted that the definition of the novel may be extended so as to include the extremes of realistic narrative on the one hand and of imaginative license on the other. The sequence of human events chronicled may take place in the Black Forest or in the Forest of Arden; on Long Island or on some fabled Atlantis. And the events themselves may range from the photographic details of the Chicago stock-yards to the romantic adventures of Argalus and Parthenia in the shadowy groves of Arcadia. The "human and emotional" events are not at variance with truth because, perchance, they are not a record of actual facts.1 Hence we have the realism of Zola and the imagination of Hawthorne. In other words, a definition of the novel must be broad enough to include what is generally known as the romance, and the attempt to differentiate these two terms is one reason for the disparity that we have already noted among the conflicting definitions of the literary type under discussion.

From what has been presented thus briefly, it is clear that the novel offers the broadest possible field for the genius of the narrative writer. On no side is he limited so strictly as is the historiographer or the biographer. If his attitude to life be that of the fatalist, he will draw his narrative to that dark pattern, and “Time, the archsatirist, will have his joke out" to the end. If, again, he sees the world through a brighter, more cheerful glass, he will conduct his hero through many adventures, at the

1 For further discussion of "truth" and "fact," see Winchester's Principles of Literary Criticism, pp. 148–52.