ew):--
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who"--

to convince us that from his very early youth he has been an
indefatigable asker of questions. It was only through a healthy
curiosity that he could have acquired the enormous stores of specific
knowledge concerning almost every walk of life that he has displayed
in his successive volumes. On the other hand, it was obviously through
his vast endowment of sympathy that Dickens was able to learn so
thoroughly all phases of the life of the lowly in London.

Experience gravitates to the man who is both curious and sympathetic.
The kingdom of adventure is within us. Just as we create beauty in an
object when we look upon it beautifully, so we create adventure all
around us when we walk the world inwardly aglow with love of life.
Things of interest happened to Robert Louis Stevenson every day of his
existence, because he incorporated the faculty of being interested in
things. In one of his most glowing essays, "The Lantern-Bearers," he
declared that never an hour of his life had gone dully yet; if it had
been spent waiting at a railway junction, he had had some scattering
thoughts, he had counted some grains of memory, compared to which the
whole of many romances seemed but dross. The author who aspires to
write fiction should cultivate the faculty of caring for all things
that come to pass; he should train himself rigorously never to be
bored; he should look upon all life that swims into his ken with
curious and sympathetic eyes, remembering always that sympathy is a
deeper faculty than curiosity: and because of the profound joy of his
interest in life, he should endeavor humbly to earn that heritage of
interest by developing a thorough understanding of its source. In this
way, perhaps, he may grow aware of certain truths of life which are
materials for fiction. If so, he will have accomplished the better
half of his work: he will have found something to say.

CHAPTER II

REALISM AND ROMANCE

Although all writers of fiction who take their work seriously and do
it honestly are at one in their purpose--namely, to embody certain
truths of human life in a series of imagined facts--they diverge into
two contrasted groups according to their manner of accomplishing this
purpose,--their method of exhibiting the truth. Consequently we find
in practice two contrasted schools of novelists, which we distinguish
by the titles Realistic and Roman