tle with his whip upon the green
shutters of the inn at Burford.[17]

Now, this is one of the natural appetites with which any lively
literature has to count. The desire for knowledge, I had almost added
the desire for meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit
and striking incident. The dullest of clowns tells, or tries to tell,
himself a story, as the feeblest of children uses invention in his play;
and even as the imaginative grown person, joining in the game, at once
enriches it with many delightful circumstances, the great creative
writer shows us the realisation and the apotheosis of the day-dreams of
common men. His stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but
their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and
to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should
fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should
follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but
all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in
music. The threads of a story come from time to time together and make a
picture in the web; the characters fall from time to time into some
attitude to each other or to nature, which stamps the story home like an
illustration. Crusoe recoiling from the footprint, Achilles shouting
over against the Trojans, Ulysses bending the great bow, Christian
running with his fingers in his ears,--these are each culminating
moments in the legend, and each has been printed on the mind's eye for
ever. Other things we may forget; we may forget the words, although they
are beautiful; we may forget the author's comment, although perhaps it
was ingenious and true; but these epoch-making scenes, which put the
last mark of truth upon a story, and fill up, at one blow, our capacity
for sympathetic pleasure, we so adopt into the very bosom of our mind
that neither time nor tide can efface or weaken the impression. This,
then, is the plastic part of literature: to embody character, thought,
or emotion in some act or attitude that shall be remarkably striking to
the mind's eye. This is the highest and hardest thing to do in words;
the thing which, once accomplished, equally delights the schoolboy and
the sage, and makes, in its own right, the quality of epics. Compared
with this, all other purposes in literature, except the purely lyrical
or the purely philosophic, are bastard in nature, facile of execution,
an