m all
for the amusement of the world.

A Comparison.

At first sight it may seem absurd to compare Mr. Stockton with Defoe.
You can scarcely imagine two men with more dissimilar notions of the
value of gracefulness and humor, or with more divergent aims in
writing. Mr. Stockton is nothing if not fanciful, and Defoe is hardly
fanciful at all. Nevertheless in reading one I am constantly reminded
of the other. You must remember Mr. Stockton's habit is to confine his
eccentricities of fancy to the postulates of a tale. He starts with
some wildly unusual--but, as a rule, not impossible--conjuncture of
circumstances. This being granted, however, he deduces his story
logically and precisely, appealing never to our passions and almost
constantly to our common sense. His people are as full of common-sense
as Defoe's. They may have more pluck than the average man or woman,
and they usually have more adaptability; but they apply to
extraordinary circumstances the good unsentimental reasoning of
ordinary life, and usually with the happiest results. The shipwreck of
Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine was extraordinary enough, but their
subsequent conduct was rational almost to precision: and in
story-telling rationality does for fancy what economy of emotional
utterances does for emotion. We may apply to Mr. Stockton's tales a
remark which Mr. Saintsbury let fall some years ago upon
dream-literature. He was speaking particularly of Flaubert's
_Tentation de Saint Antoine_:--

"The capacities of dreams and hallucinations for literary
treatment are undoubted. But most writers, including even De
Quincey, who have tried this style, have erred, inasmuch as they
have endeavoured to throw a portion of the mystery with which the
waking mind invests dreams over the dream itself. Anyone's
experience is sufficient to show that this is wrong. The events
of dreams as they happen are quite plain and matter-of-fact, and
it is only in the intervals, and, so to speak, the
scene-shifting of dreaming, that any suspicion of strangeness
occurs to the dreamer."

A dream, however wild, is quite plain and matter-of-fact to the
dreamer; therefore, for verisimilitude, the narrative of a dream
should be quite plain and matter-of-fact. In the same way the narrator
of an extremely fanciful tale should--since verisimilitude is the
first aim of story-telling--attempt to exclude all suspicion of the
unnatural fro